Lindsay Farmer

The boundaries of the criminal law

1. Introduction: The Boundaries of the Criminal Law 2. Criminalization and the Criminal Process: Prudential Mercy as a Limit on Penal Sanctions in an Era of Mass Incarceration 3. Preventative Orders: A Problem of Undercriminalization? 4. Perversions and Subversions of Criminal Law 5. Proactive Forensic Profiling: Proactive Criminalization? 6. Horrific Crime 7. Criminalization and Regulation 8. Criminal Law between Public and Private Law 9. Criminal Wrongs in Historical Perspective 10. Theories of Criminalization and the Limits of Criminal Law: a Legal Cultural Approach

Reconstructing the English Codification Debate: The Criminal Law Commissioners, 1833–45

Sir Henry Maine, the eminent Victorian jurist, once remarked, in frustration at being unable to secure his desired reforms of the Indian criminal law, that no one cared about the penal code except theorists and habitual criminals. This has been the recurrent lament of the English criminal lawyer. Repeated initiatives in the field of codification over the last 150 years have enjoyed little popular support or understanding, and as the most recent project stumbles forward into its fourth decade, an air of fatalism surrounds the entire question of the code. There are calls for a new political initiative to revive the project, and there have been more modest appeals for a reexamination of the principles of existing penal legislation, though neither seems likely to provoke much response. Yet, for all of the recent discussion of codes and codification, the question of the significance of codification to the modern law remains something of an enigma.

Making the modern criminal law : criminalization and civil order

PART I: CRIMINAL LAW AS AN INSTITUTION PART II: GENERAL PART III: SPECIAL PART IV: THE LIMITS OF A NORMATIVE THEORY OF CRIMINALISATION

The constitution of the criminal law

R.A. Duff and John Gardner have recently suggested that responsibility should be understood in terms of answerability, i.e. in terms of the reasons offered by the agent in order to justify her conduct. However, this idea is formulated in very different ways by the two. Gardner’s account is “non-relational” in that it assumes that all moral reasons ultimately apply to every moral agent and that “everyone’s conformity to every reason is everyone’s business”. This means that, although there are obvious pragmatic reasons to limit the practice of calling each other to account, in principle we are answerable to everyone for everything. The model defended by Duff, on the other hand, is relational in that it ties the right to call someone to account to the existence of relevant normative relationships between members of specific groups. In particular, Duff ties criminal responsibility to membership in the political community: being criminally responsible is being answerable to our fellow citizens for those wrongs that violate the fundamental values of the political community. While espousing the relational model defended by Duff, I suggest that there is a class of wrongs, namely violations of basic human rights, for which we are answerable not only to our fellow citizens, but also to all human beings. This is because while we can account for the wrongness of crimes such as theft or tax evasion simply by appealing to Duff’s thought that these crimes violate the fundamental values of the political community, the wrongness of crimes such as murder or rape cannot be reduced to that. We are certainly answerable for these crimes to our fellow citizens because to the extent that our polity declares them as public wrongs, in perpetrating them we fail to treat the victim with the respect owed to her as a fellow citizen. But we are also answerable for them to the whole of humanity because in committing them we also fail to treat the victim with the respect owed to her as a fellow human being.

Response 2: Criminal law as a security project:

This article asks how criminal law might be understood as a security project. Following Valverde’s lead, it does this not by trying to define the concept of security, but by looking at the operation of the temporal and spatial logics of the criminal law. It looks first at the basic logics of time and space in conceptions of criminal liability and jurisdiction, before reviewing some recent developments which challenge these practices and what these might mean for understanding criminal law as a security project.

Criminal wrongs in historical perspective

1. Introduction: The Boundaries of the Criminal Law 2. Criminalization and the Criminal Process: Prudential Mercy as a Limit on Penal Sanctions in an Era of Mass Incarceration 3. Preventative Orders: A Problem of Undercriminalization? 4. Perversions and Subversions of Criminal Law 5. Proactive Forensic Profiling: Proactive Criminalization? 6. Horrific Crime 7. Criminalization and Regulation 8. Criminal Law between Public and Private Law 9. Criminal Wrongs in Historical Perspective 10. Theories of Criminalization and the Limits of Criminal Law: a Legal Cultural Approach

‘With all the Impressiveness and Substantial Value of Truth’: Notable Trials and Criminal Justice, 1750–1930

In addition, he reported that over one hundred ‘pressmen’ were present to cover the case, including ‘twenty-one descriptive writers, fifteen artists, and seventy reporters’.3 A similar popular anthology of trials, Dramatic Days at the Old Bailey, published in 1928, begins by referring to the queues of people who waited overnight for admission to the trial of James (2007) 1 Law and Humanities 57–78

Censure: Moral and Sociological

The concept of censure, as developed in different ways, in the work of Sumner and von Hirsch, has enormous potential—though each of the accounts has its own limitations—In this chapter, I discuss both theories and show some way in which there is a common ground between them, and to offer some suggestions as to ways that this common ground might be developed, bringing criminology and criminal law theory into a new kind of dialogue.

Book review: Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept

Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept Reiner Robert , Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept, Polity: Cambridge, 2016; 272 pp.: 9780745660301, £50.00 (hbk).

Dialogue and Debate Seizing the Law: 25 Years of Images of Law

SOME 25 YEARS ago Bańkowski and Mungham’s Images of Law argued that the then current practice and teaching of law meant oppression and desolation. It contended that attempts to liberalize law – to give law a human face – were destined to fail since the images of freedom they provided did not grapple with the reality of enslavement to and by the law. Images of Law was an influential book: widely read, reviewed and discussed. A quarter of a century later, what remains of the future of the radical project outlined by the book? To what extent has legal education been transformed by critical theory and practice? Are the style and form of such theorizing merely time-bound, period fashions? Has political economy, for example, inevitably lost its theoretical and practical currency? And what images of law now dominate our understandings of legal theory, practice and education? In short, do the ideas expressed in the book, and the movement of which it was an expression, have any force or contemporary relevance? These were the questions that contributors to a workshop at the University of Edinburgh in June 2001 were asked to address.1 The contributors included several people who had been contemporaries or colleagues of Bańkowski and Mungham at the time the book was being written, or who had commented on or reviewed the book when it was first published. These were together with a number of scholars of a younger generation who had been either taught or influenced by Bańkowski and Mungham. The discussions were organized around the themes of legal practice and education, the politics of law, and epistemology and power. The papers that form the basis for this symposium are derived from the discussions and debate that took place over the two days of the meeting. They offer up a series of reflections and challenges for contemporary legal theory and critical legal studies, as well as offering an ample demonstration of the continuing relevance of the theoretical position set out in Images of Law to the project of legal scholarship and education.