On October 1st 1934 Willem P.J. Pompe (1893-1968), Professor of Criminal Law at Utrecht University between 1928 and 1963, founded the 'Criminological Institute' (Criminologisch Instituut) within the Faculty of Law of Utrecht University. Pompe initiated a rather influential academic movement, based on multidisciplinary cooperation between jurists, criminologists and psychiatrists. This academic movement is commonly referred to as 'the Utrecht School', which had its heyday in the 1950s.

In 1974 - forty years after its formation - the Institute was renamed after its founder: the Willem Pompe Instituut voor Strafrechtswetenschappen. And another forty years later, in 2014, the Institute celebrated its eightieth anniversary. This book is written with the aim of adding lustre to this festive occasion. The central theme chosen for this collection of chapters is crossborder research in the fields of criminal law, penitentiary law, criminology, and forensic psychology and psychiatry. Besides a prologue and a postscript, the book contains twenty-three chapters, clustered in five parts. This first part consists of contributions that primarily address the history and research tradition of the Institute. Parts two to five each contain a number of contributions that represent the current state of the research activities at the Institute, and cover a variety of contemporary issues in, respectively, general criminal law and criminal procedure, in regulatory criminal law, European criminal law, juvenile criminal law, and penitentiary law, in forensic psychology and psychiatry, and in criminology.