Custom and Legal and Material Elements of Crime

The validity of custom due to Iranian criminal law system is regarded as one of the guidance sources. Notwithstanding the fact that custom can just inspire the legislator and cannot be independently referred to in criminalization, considering the principle of legality in criminal law, after accepting the statute system in Iran, custom became important in recognition of the legal concepts and inference of rules of criminal law from criminal texts. Because the assumption of the legislator is that laws are codified in the customary language, custom found an important role in this regard. The custom is also a unique source of criminal law in the recognition of some parts of triple elements of crime. In this paper, the effect of custom on the recognition of legal and material elements of crime is discussed in detail and also the obligatoriness of this source is argued.