Download or read book The Limits of Blame written by Erin I. Kelly and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration. The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.
Download or read book Positive Obligations in Criminal Law written by Andrew Ashworth and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-07-18 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a set of essays, old and new, examining the positive obligations of individuals and the state in matters of criminal law. The centrepiece is a new, extended essay on the criminalisation of omissions-examining the duties to act imposed on individuals and organisations by the criminal law, and assessing their moral and social foundations. Alongside this is another new essay on the state's positive obligations to put in place criminal laws to protect certain individual rights. Introducing the volume is the author's much-cited essay on criminalisation, 'Is the Criminal Law a Lost Cause?'. The book sets out to shed new light on contemporary arguments about the proper boundaries of the criminal law, not least by exploring the justifications for imposing positive duties (reinforced by the criminal law) on individuals and their relation to the positive obligations of the state.
Download or read book Responsibility for Justice written by Iris Marion Young and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-19 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of "one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century" (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. In her long-awaited Responsibility for Justice, Young discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. Young argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which she calls the "social connection" model. She develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live. With a foreward by Martha C. Nussbaum, this last statement by a revered and highly influential thinker will be of great interest to political theorists and philosophers, ethicists, and feminist and political philosophers.
Download or read book Victims Rights and Victims Wrongs written by Vera Bergelson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-18 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Don't blame the victim" is a cornerstone maxim of Anglo-American jurisprudence, but should the law generally ignore a victim's behavior in determining a defendant's liability? Victims' Rights and Victims' Wrongs criticizes the current criminal law approach and outlines a more fair, coherent, and efficient set of rules to recognize that victims sometimes co-author their own losses or injuries. Evaluating a number of controversial cases involving euthanasia, sadomasochism, date rape, battered wives, and "innocent" aggressors, Vera Bergelson builds a theoretical foundation for reform. Her approach to comparative criminal liability takes into account the actions of both the perpetrator and the victim and offers a unitary explanation for consent, self-defense, and provocation. This innovative book supplies a practical and coherent mechanism for evaluating the impact of a victim's conduct on a perpetrator's liability in a variety of circumstances, including those that are now artificially excluded from comparative analysis.
Download or read book Legal Blame written by Neal Feigenson and published by Amer Psychological Assn. This book was released on 2001 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Legal Blame sheds new light on how jurors try to do justice in the wake of accidents and reveals much about the overall psychology of jury decision making. Neal Feigenson, a professor of law, offers an illuminating framework for how jurors use their common sense, together with the law and the facts, to produce what the author refers to as "total justice." This book will appeal to lawyers, expert witnesses, practicing students, and academics, as well as anyone who is interested in learning about the psychology of legal persuasion.
Download or read book Justice Liability And Blame written by Paul Robinson and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1995-03-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do lay judgments about criminal transgressions conflict with the way a case is judged within the legal code? The authors, a law professor and a research psychologist, suggest that such discrepancies in judgment can lead to the loss of the legal code's effectiveness of exercising moral authority within the community. An important look at the breakdown of law and order.
Download or read book Corporations and Criminal Responsibility written by Celia Wells and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Business corporations wield enormous economic power, and legal structures largely serve their interests. This book analyses the background to the demands to use criminal law sanctions against corporations, including demand for corporate manslaughter.
Download or read book Responsibility in Law and Morality written by Peter Cane and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2002-04-17 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawyers who write about responsibility tend to focus on criminal law at the expense of civil and public law; while philosophers tend to treat responsibility as a moral concept,and either ignore the law or consider legal responsibility to be a more or less distorted reflection of its moral counterpart. This book aims to counteract both of these biases. By adopting a comparative institutional approach to the relationship between law and morality, it challenges the common view that morality stands to law as critical standard to conventional practice. It shows how law and morality interact symbiotically, and how careful study of legal concepts of responsibility can add significantly to our understanding of responsibility more generally. Central to this project is a distinction between two paradigms of responsibility -- the criminal law paradigm and the civil law paradigm. Whereas theoretical discussions of responsibility tend focus on conduct and agency, taking account of civil law reveals the importance of outcomes and the interests of victims and society to ideas of responsibility. The book examines from a distinctively legal point of view central philosophical questions about responsibility such as its relationship with culpability (challenging the common view that moral responsibility requires fault), causation and personality. It explores the relevance of sanctions and problems of proof and enforcement to ideas of responsibility, as well as the relationship between responsibility and distributive justice, and the role of concepts of responsibility in public law. At the heart of this book lie two questions: what does it mean to say we are responsible? and, what are our responsibilities? Its aim is not to answer these questions but to challenge some traditional approaches to answering them and more importantly, to suggest fruitful alternative approaches that take law seriously.
Download or read book Moral Puzzles and Legal Perplexities written by Heidi M. Hurd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engages with the life and work of Larry Alexander to explore puzzles and paradoxes in legal and moral theory.
Download or read book Placing Blame written by Michael S. Moore and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 873 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of essays written by Moore which form a thorough examination of the theory of criminal responsibility. The author covers a wide range of topics, giving the book a coherence and unity which is rare in assembled essays. Perhaps the most significant feature of this book isMoore's espousal of a retributivist theory of punishment. This anti-utilitarian standpoint is a common thread throughout the book. It is also a trend which is currently manifesting itself in all areas of moral, political and legal philosophy, but Moore is one of the first to apply such attitudes sosytematically to criminal law theory. As such, this innovative, new book will be of great interest to all scholars in this field.
Download or read book Ignorance of Law written by Douglas Husak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that ignorance of law should usually be a complete excuse from criminal liability. It defends this conclusion by invoking two presumptions: first, the content of criminal law should conform to morality; second, mistakes of fact and mistakes of law should be treated symmetrically. The author grounds his position in an underlying theory of moral and criminal responsibility according to which blameworthiness consists in a defective response to the moral reasons one has. Since persons cannot be faulted for failing to respond to reasons for criminal liability they do not believe they have, then ignorance should almost always excuse. But persons are somewhat responsible for their wrongs when their mistakes of law are reckless, that is, when they consciously disregard a substantial and unjustifiable risk that their conduct might be wrong. This book illustrates this with examples and critiques the arguments to the contrary offered by criminal theorists and moral philosophers. It assesses the real-world implications for the U.S. system of criminal justice. The author describes connections between the problem of ignorance of law and other topics in moral and legal theory.
Download or read book Justice through Apologies written by Nick Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this follow up to I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies, Nick Smith expands his ambitious theories of categorical apologies to civil and criminal law. After rejecting court-ordered apologies as unjustifiable humiliation, this book explains that penitentiaries were originally designed to bring about penance - something like apology - and that this tradition has been lost in the assembly line of mass incarceration. Smith argues that the state should modernize these principles and techniques to reduce punishments for offenders who demonstrate moral transformation through apologizing. Smith also explains the counterintuitive situation whereby apologies come to have considerable financial worth in civil cases because victims associate them with priceless matters of the soul. Such confusions allow powerful wrongdoers to manipulate perceptions to disastrous effect, such as when corporations or governments assert that apologies do not equate to accepting blame or require reform or redress.
Download or read book Blame and Punishment written by Sanford H. Kadish and published by Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. This book was released on 1987 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society written by Elizabeth Shaw and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Free will skepticism' refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings lack the control in action - i.e. the free will - required for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. Critics fear that adopting this view would have harmful consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and laws. Optimistic free will skeptics, on the other hand, respond by arguing that life without free will and so-called basic desert moral responsibility would not be harmful in these ways, and might even be beneficial. This collection addresses the practical implications of free will skepticism for law and society. It contains eleven original essays that provide alternatives to retributive punishment, explore what (if any) changes are needed for the criminal justice system, and ask whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the real-world implications of free will skepticism.
Download or read book Responsibility and Psychopathy written by Luca Malatesti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discussion of whether psychopaths are morally responsible for their behaviour has long taken place in philosophy. In recent years this has moved into scientific and psychiatric investigation. Responsibility and Psychopathy discusses this subject from both the philosophical and scientific disciplines, as well as a legal perspective.
Download or read book Rejecting Retributivism written by Gregg D. Caruso and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-29 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caruso argues against retributivism and develops an alternative for addressing criminal behavior that is ethically defensible and practical.
Download or read book Core Concepts in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice written by Kai Ambos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative and collaborative study of the foundational principles and concepts that underpin different domestic systems of criminal law.
