Strafrecht als letztes Mittel

'Criminal Law as a Last Resort. Linguistic and Cognitive Distortions of the Ultima Ratio Principle': The thesis examines the ultima ratio principle (last resort), which is ubiquitous in criminal law discourse. It shows that neither legal scholarship nor case law provides robust criteria for determining when this principle is violated, reconstructs its derivations and its practical uses, and demonstrates that the principle is a pseudo-concept distorted both linguistically and cognitively. Drawing on empirical ethics and moral psychology, it prepares a new way of dealing with this issue in legal discourse.