On Crime, Society, and Responsibility in the Work of Nicola Lacey


Book Description

This book examines responsibility in criminal law across categorization, frameworks for understanding criminal responsibility and the relationships between them, women in criminal law, the history of criminal law, blameworthiness and ascriptions of responsibility, moral responsibility, the role of politics and political economy.




On Crime, Society, and Responsibility in the work of Nicola Lacey


Book Description

Few contemporary scholars have done more in their work to develop the idea of responsibility than Nicola Lacey. She ranks alongside thinkers and writers such as HLA Hart and Antony Honoré in developing approaches to understanding responsibility. Like these authors, the influence of her work has spread beyond academia to change the perception of responsibility amongst practitioners. Both Hart and Honoré have during their lifetime had volumes dedicated to their work. This book does the same for Nicola Lacey, marking her ongoing influence and accomplishments in the common law world through a collection of essays by leading international scholars reflecting and interrogating her contribution to understanding criminal responsibility. Additionally, the book aims to promote the best legal scholarship on responsibility in the common law world and inspire the brightest legal scholars through a collection of essays designed to mark Professor Lacey's ongoing contribution to the understanding of criminal responsibility. The role of Professor Lacey's work in this area (as well as others) cannot be overlooked: her scholarship includes not only a prize-winning biography of HLA Hart himself but numerous articles and tomes on the subject, culminating with her most recent work In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions (OUP 2016). This Festschrift, one of few common law publications to pay homage to the erudition of a female jurist, can be seen as a continuation of the themes in this book via reflection and interrogation of her work by leading scholars on the topic. The Festschrift will therefore not only be a celebration of her work but also an attempt to take forward intellectual engagement with the topic of responsibility by continued engagement with her ideas. Each author brings new ideas to bear on her work, touching upon important aspects of responsibility that are current in the scholarship: categorization, frameworks for understanding criminal responsibility and the relationships between them, women in criminal law, the history of criminal law, blameworthiness and ascriptions of responsibility, moral responsibility, the role of politics and political economy. Nicola Lacey is a School Professor of Law, Gender, and Social Policy. From 1998 to 2010 she held a Chair in Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the LSE; she returned to the LSE in 2013 after spending three years as Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford. She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School and the Australian National University. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College Oxford and University College Oxford; and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2011 she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern for outstanding scholarship on the function of the rule of law in late modern societies; and in 2018, an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Edinburgh. In 2017 she was awarded a CBE for services to Law, Justice, and Gender Politics.




In Search of Criminal Responsibility


Book Description

What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable tof punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the offender, meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution. Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history.




Imprisoning Communities


Book Description

In the first detailed, empirical exploration of the effects of mass incarceration on poor places, Imprisoning Communities demonstrates that in high doses incarceration contributes to the very social problems it is intended to solve: it breaks up family and social networks; deprives siblings, spouses, and parents of emotional and financial support; and threatens the economic and political infrastructure of already struggling neighborhoods. Especially at risk are children who, research shows, are more likely to commit a crime if a father or brother has been to prison. Clear makes the counterintuitive point that when incarceration concentrates at high levels, crime rates will go up. Removal, in other words, has exactly the opposite of its intended effect: it destabilizes the community, thus further reducing public safety.




Women, Crime, and Character


Book Description

This book draws on law, literature, philosophy and social history to explore fundamental changes in ideas of selfhood, gender and social order in 18th and 19th Century England. Lacey argues that these changes underpinned a radical shift in mechanisms of responsibility-attribution, with decisive implications for the criminalisation of women.




The Constitution of the Criminal Law


Book Description

The third book in the Criminalization series examines the constitutionalization of criminal law. It considers how the criminal law is constituted through the political processes of the state; how the agents of the criminal law can be answerable to it themselves; and finally, how the criminal law can be constituted as part of the international order. Addressing the ways in which and the grounds on which types of conduct can be justifiably criminalized, the first four chapters of this volume focus on the questions that arise from a consideration of the political constitution of the criminal law. The contributors then turn their attention to the role of the state, its institutions and officials, and their role not only as creators, enactors, interpreters, and enforcers of the criminal law, but also as subjects of it. How can the agents of the criminal law also be answerable to it? Finally discussion turns to how the criminal law can be constituted as part of an international order. Examining the relationships between domestic laws of different nation-states, and between domestic criminal law and international or transnational law, the chapters also look at the authority and jurisdiction of international criminal law itself, and its relationship to other dimensions of the international order. A vital examination of one of the most important topics in modern criminal legal theory, this volume raises new questions central to the study of the criminal law and offers new suggestions for addressing them.




Structural Injustice and the Law


Book Description

In developing her conception of structural injustice, Iris Marion Young made a strict distinction between large-scale collective injustice that results from the normal functions of a society, and the more familiar concepts of individual wrong and deliberate state repression. Her ideas have attracted considerable attention in political philosophy, but legal theorists have been slower to consider the relation between structural injustice and legal analysis. While some forms of vulnerability to structural injustice can be the unintended consequences of legal rules, the law also has potential instruments to alleviate some forms of structural injustice. Structural Injustice and the Law presents theoretical approaches and concrete examples to show how the concept of structural injustice can aid legal analysis, and how legal reform can, in practice, reduce or even eliminate some forms of structural injustice. A group of outstanding law and political philosophy scholars discuss a comprehensive range of interdisciplinary topics, including the notion of domination, equality and human rights law, legal status, sweatshop labour, labour law, criminal justice, domestic homicide reviews, begging, homelessness, regulatory public bodies and the films of Ken Loach. Drawn together, they build an invaluable resource for legal theorists exploring how to make use of the concept of structural injustice, and for political philosophers looking for a nuanced account of the law’s role both in creating and mitigating structural injustice.




State Punishment


Book Description

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.




Self, Others and the State


Book Description

Criminal responsibility is now central to criminal law, but it is in need of re-examination. In the context of Australian criminal laws, Self, Others and the State reassesses the general assumptions made about the rise to prominence of criminal responsibility in the period since around the turn of the twentieth century. It reconsiders the role of criminal responsibility in criminal law, arguing that criminal responsibility is significant because it organises key sets of relations - between self, others and the state - as relations of responsibility. Detailed studies of decisive moments and developments since the turn of the twentieth century, and original explorations of relations of responsibility, expose the complexity and dynamism of criminal responsibility and reveal that it is the means by which matters of subjectivity, relationality and power make themselves felt in the criminal law.




Leading Works in Criminal Law


Book Description

This book analyses a selection of leading works in the criminal law to ask questions about how the modern discipline of criminal law has developed, how it has been deployed in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and how criminal law scholarship has engaged with traditionally marginalised perspectives such as feminism, queer theory, and anti-carceral and abolitionist movements. The works analysed range from Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code (1837) to more recent textbooks and monographs on criminal law, and their jurisdictional reach extends to India, Canada, Australia, Malawi, the UK and the USA. The contributing authors include scholars, activists and legal practitioners, each of whom explores the intellectual development and geographical reach of Anglocriminal law via the work they analyse. Across the collection, the editors and contributors address the question of what it means to be a leading work in criminal law. The book will be a valuable resource for students, academics and researchers working in the area of criminal law.