Download or read book Overcriminalization written by Douglas Husak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States today suffers from too much criminal law and too much punishment. Husak describes the phenomena in some detail and explores their relation, and why these trends produce massive injustice. His primary goal is to defend a set of constraints that limit the authority of states to enact and enforce penal offenses. The book urges the weight and relevance of this topic in the real world, and notes that most Anglo-American legal philosophers have neglected it. Husak's secondary goal is to situate this endeavor in criminal theory as traditionally construed. He argues that many of the resources to reduce the size and scope of the criminal law can be derived from within the criminal law itself-even though these resources have not been used explicitly for this purpose. Additional constraints emerge from a political view about the conditions under which important rights such as the right implicated by punishment-may be infringed. When conjoined, these constraints produce what Husak calls a minimalist theory of criminal liability. Husak applies these constraints to a handful of examples-most notably, to the justifiability of drug proscriptions.
Download or read book The Limits of Criminal Law written by Matthew Dyson and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a framework of core principles, 'The Limits of Criminal Law' explores the normative and performative limits of criminal law at the borders of crime with tort, non-criminal enforcement, medical law, business regulation, administrative sanctions, terrorism and intelligence law. It carefully juxtaposes and compares English and German law on each of these borders, drawing out underlying concepts and building a detailed picture of what shapes criminal law, where its limits come from, and what might motivate legal systems to strain, ignore or strengthen those limits.
Download or read book Prevention and the Limits of the Criminal Law written by Andrew Ashworth and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 1171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the principles and values that should guide and limit the state's use of preventive techniques that involve coercion against the individual, this volume arises from a three-year study of Preventive Justice. The contributions examine whether and when preventive measures are justified, whether within or outwith the criminal law, and whether they signal a larger change in the architecture of security. Preventive measures include controversial crime control approaches such as pre-inchoate offences, pre-trial detention, restraining orders, and prevention detention of the dangerous. There are good reasons to justify state use of coercion to protect the public from harm, but while the rationales and justifications for state punishment have been extensively explored, the scope, limits, and principles of preventive justice have not received the same attention. This volume, written by world renowned scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and jurisdictions, redresses the balance, assessing the foundations for the range of coercive measures that states now take in the name of prevention and public protection.
Download or read book The Limits of the Criminal Sanction written by Herbert Packer and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1968-06-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The argument of this book begins with the proposition that there are certain things we must understand about the criminal sanction before we can begin to talk sensibly about its limits. First, we need to ask some questions about the rationale of the criminal sanction. What are we trying to do by defining conduct as criminal and punishing people who commit crimes? To what extent are we justified in thinking that we can or ought to do what we are trying to do? Is it possible to construct an acceptable rationale for the criminal sanction enabling us to deal with the argument that it is itself an unethical use of social power? And if it is possible, what implications does that rationale have for the kind of conceptual creature that the criminal law is? Questions of this order make up Part I of the book, which is essentially an extended essay on the nature and justification of the criminal sanction. We also need to understand, so the argument continues, the characteristic processes through which the criminal sanction operates. What do the rules of the game tell us about what the state may and may not do to apprehend, charge, convict, and dispose of persons suspected of committing crimes? Here, too, there is great controversy between two groups who have quite different views, or models, of what the criminal process is all about. There are people who see the criminal process as essentially devoted to values of efficiency in the suppression of crime. There are others who see those values as subordinate to the protection of the individual in his confrontation with the state. A severe struggle over these conflicting values has been going on in the courts of this country for the last decade or more. How that struggle is to be resolved is a second major consideration that we need to take into account before tackling the question of the limits of the criminal sanction. These problems of process are examined in Part II. Part III deals directly with the central problem of defining criteria for limiting the reach of the criminal sanction. Given the constraints of rationale and process examined in Parts I and II, it argues that we have over-relied on the criminal sanction and that we had better start thinking in a systematic way about how to adjust our commitments to our capacities, both moral and operational.
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 The Limits of Criminal Law written by Mr Carl Constantin Lauterwein and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book compares the civil and common law approach to analyze the question – 'What sorts of conduct may the state legitimately make criminal?'. Through a comparative focus on an Australian and German context, this book utilizes interviews with Australian criminal law experts and contrasts them with the German model based on 'Rechtsgutstheorie'. By comparing the largely descriptive, criminology-based Australian approach with the more sophisticated German legal theory model the author finds the Australian approach to be suffering from a 'normative flaw', illustrated by the distinction of different approaches to the offences of incest, bestiality and possession of illicit drugs. Carl Constantin Lauterwein discovers that while there is strength in the common law approach of describing the possible reasons for criminalizing certain conduct, the approach could be significantly improved by scrutinizing the legitimacy of those reasons.
Download or read book The Boundaries of the Criminal Law written by R.A. Duff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book of a series on criminalization - examining the principles and goals that should guide what kinds of conduct are to be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. The first volume studies the scope and boundaries of the criminal law - asking what principled limits might be placed on criminalizing behaviour.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Criminal Law written by John Deigh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title contains 17 original essays by leading thinkers in the field and covers the field's major topics including limits to criminalization, obscenity and hate speech, blackmail, the law of rape, attempts, accomplice liability, causation responsibility, justification and excuse, duress, and more.
Download or read book Facing the Limits of the Law written by Erik Claes and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-04-21 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many legal experts no longer share an unbounded trust in the potential of law to govern society efficiently and responsibly. They often experience the 'limits of the law', as they are confronted with striking inadequacies in their legal toolbox, with inner inconsistencies of the law, with problems of enforcement and obedience, and with undesired side-effects, and so on. The contributors to this book engage in the challenging task of making sense of this experience. Against the background of broader cultural transformations (such as globalisation, new technologies, individualism and cultural diversity), they revisit a wide range of areas of the law and map different types of limits in relation to some basic functions and characteristics of the law. Additionally, they offer a set of strategies to manage justifiably law's limits, such as dedramatising law's limits, conceptual refinement ('constructivism'), striking the right balance between different functions of the law, seeking for complementarity between law and other social practices.
Download or read book Legal Violence and the Limits of the Law written by Amy Swiffen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the meaning of punishment today? Where is the limit that separates it from the cruel and unusual? In legal discourse, the distinction between punishment and vengeance—punishment being the measured use of legally sanctioned violence and vengeance being a use of violence that has no measure—is expressed by the idea of "cruel and unusual punishment." This phrase was originally contained in the English Bill of Rights (1689). But it (and versions of it) has since found its way into numerous constitutions and declarations, including Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the Amendment to the US Constitution. Clearly, in order for the use of violence to be legitimate, it must be subject to limitation. The difficulty is that the determination of this limit should be objective, but it is not, and its application in punitive practice is constituted by a host of extra-legal factors and social and political structures. It is this essential contestability of the limit which distinguishes punishment from violence that this book addresses. And, including contributions from a range of internationally renowned scholars, it offers a plurality of original and important responses to the contemporary question of the relationship between punishment and the limits of law.
Download or read book Offense to Others written by Joel Feinberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1988-01-07 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume in Joel Feinberg's series The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Offense to Others focuses on the "offense principle," which maintains that preventing shock, disgust, or revulsion is always a morally relevant reason for legal prohibitions. Feinberg clarifies the concept of an "offended mental state" and further contrasts the concept of offense with harm. He also considers the law of nuisance as a model for statutes creating "morals offenses," showing its inadequacy as a model for understanding "profound offenses," and discusses such issues as obscene words and social policy, pornography and the Constitution, and the differences between minor and profound offenses.
Download or read book A Pattern of Violence written by David Alan Sklansky and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A law professor and former prosecutor reveals how inconsistent ideas about violence, enshrined in law, are at the root of the problems that plague our entire criminal justice system—from mass incarceration to police brutality. We take for granted that some crimes are violent and others aren’t. But how do we decide what counts as a violent act? David Alan Sklansky argues that legal notions about violence—its definition, causes, and moral significance—are functions of political choices, not eternal truths. And these choices are central to failures of our criminal justice system. The common distinction between violent and nonviolent acts, for example, played virtually no role in criminal law before the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet to this day, with more crimes than ever called “violent,” this distinction determines how we judge the seriousness of an offense, as well as the perpetrator’s debt and danger to society. Similarly, criminal law today treats violence as a pathology of individual character. But in other areas of law, including the procedural law that covers police conduct, the situational context of violence carries more weight. The result of these inconsistencies, and of society’s unique fear of violence since the 1960s, has been an application of law that reinforces inequities of race and class, undermining law’s legitimacy. A Pattern of Violence shows that novel legal philosophies of violence have motivated mass incarceration, blunted efforts to hold police accountable, constrained responses to sexual assault and domestic abuse, pushed juvenile offenders into adult prisons, encouraged toleration of prison violence, and limited responses to mass shootings. Reforming legal notions of violence is therefore an essential step toward justice.
Download or read book When Nature and Nurture Collide written by Theodore Y. Blumoff and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blumoff, who is trained in psychology and law, has spent the last decade trying to bring population-wide observations from the brain sciences to the jurisprudence of criminal law, thus producing a better model of human behavior for understanding criminal misconduct. This work examines the neuropsychological injuries suffered by seriously abused and neglected children, towards an explanation for why those children produce children who tend to abuse and neglect their own children and sometimes others. This is just a brute social fact. The book is structured in three parts, Part I engages the science of child development. Part II addresses the jurisprudence of substantive criminal law, which is still mired in the dualism and formalism of a much earlier era that largely neglects the actor's biography. Part III speaks to anticipated objections and proposals for change. The work ends by drawing on the work of the philosopher John Rawls's well known "Original Position," a thought experiment on the treatment of damaged children. This book should be of interest to anyone who teaches criminal law and procedure or is involved in the administration of criminal justice, including those individuals who provide social services to the incarcerated. It could be an assigned text in a law and psychiatry course or a criminal law or jurisprudence seminar. This book is also useful for students and teachers in specialized post-graduate criminology programs, federal and state law enforcement agencies that profile offenders, specialists in the jurisprudence of punishment, and some upper-division courses in criminal justice.
Download or read book Crimes Harms and Wrongs written by A P Simester and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-06-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When should we make use of the criminal law? Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs offers a philosophical analysis of the nature and ethical limits of criminalisation. The authors explore the scope of harm-based prohibitions, proscriptions of offensive behaviour, and 'paternalistic' prohibitions aimed at preventing self-harm, developing guiding principles for these various grounds of state prohibition. Both authors have written extensively in the field. They have produced an integrated, accessible, philosophically-sophisticated account that will be of great interest to legal academics, philosophers, and advanced students alike. 'this elegant, closely argued and convincing book is of great value and can be expected to be of lasting influence.' James Chalmers 'Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs . . . is a welcome addition to this field, and should clarify the reader's thinking on a breathtakingly broad range of issues. . . . This is an important book, and [its] consideration of not only Anglo-American theory and law, but also German legal doctrines and writings on criminalisation, should ensure that this debate reaches new heights in the future.' Findlay Stark 'the result of [the authors'] many decades of thought and writing on this fundamental subject is an integrated, accessible, philosophically sophisticated discussion of this subject.' Justice Gilles Renaud 'A.P. Simester and Andreas von Hirsch present an informed and systematic account of the principles that, in their view, should structure decisions about what to criminalize, and when.' Vincent Chiao 'an outstanding work, original in many respects and meticulous in its arguments. It represents the greatest advance on this subject since Feinberg's four volumes . . . an outstanding contribution to the re-invigorated criminalization debate.' Andrew Ashworth 'important, original, interesting, and often ingenious. Unlike some recent competitive books it has the virtue of making sound arguments. And like everything else the authors have written, it is a joy to read ...This is an absolutely wonderful book.' Douglas Husak
Download or read book Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law written by R. A. Duff and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-five leading contemporary theorists of criminal law tackle a range of foundational issues about the proper aims and structure of the criminal law in a liberal democracy. The challenges facing criminal law are many. There are crises of over-criminalization and over-imprisonment; penal policy has become so politicized that it is difficult to find any clear consensus on what aims the criminal law can properly serve; governments seeking to protect their citizens in the face of a range of perceived threats have pushed the outer limits of criminal law and blurred its boundaries. To think clearly about the future of criminal law, and its role in a liberal society, foundational questions about its proper scope, structure, and operations must be re-examined. What kinds of conduct should be criminalized? What are the principles of criminal responsibility? How should offences and defences be defined? The criminal process and the criminal trial need to be studied closely, and the purposes and modes of punishment should be scrutinized. Such a re-examination must draw on the resources of various disciplines-notably law, political and moral philosophy, criminology and history; it must examine both the inner logic of criminal law and its place in a larger legal and political structure; it must attend to the growing field of international criminal law, it must consider how the criminal law can respond to the challenges of a changing world. Topics covered in this volume include the question of criminalization and the proper scope of the criminal law; the grounds of criminal responsibility; the ways in which offences and defences should be defined; the criminal process and its values; criminal punishment; the relationship between international criminal law and domestic criminal law. Together, the essays provide a picture of the exciting state of criminal law theory today, and the basis for further research and debate in the coming years.
Download or read book The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law Harm to self written by Joel Feinberg and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1986 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: N this volume, Feinberg focuses on the meanings of "interest," the relationship between interests and wants, and the distinction between want-regarding and ideal-regarding analyses on interest and hard cases for the applications of the concept of harm. Examples of the "hard cases" are harm to character, vicarious harm, and prenatal and posthumous harm. Feinberg also discusses the relationship between harm and rights, the concept of a victim, and the distinctions of various quantitative dimensions of harm, consent, and offense, including the magnitude, probability, risk, and "importance" of harm.
Download or read book The Limits of Criminological Positivism written by Michele Pifferi and published by Routledge SOLON Explorations in Crime and Criminal Justice Histories. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Limits of Criminological Positivism: The Movement for Criminal Law Reform in the West, 1870-1940 presents the first major study of the limits of criminological positivism in the West and establishes the subject as a field of interest. The volume will explore those limits and bring to life the resulting doctrinal, procedural, and institutional compromises of the early twentieth century that might be said to have defined modern criminal justice administration. The book examines the topic not only in North America and western Europe, with essays on Italy, Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Finland but also the reception and implementation of positivist ideas in Brazil. In doing so, it explores three comparative elements: (1) the differing national experiences within the civil law world; (2) differences and similarities between civil law and common law regimes; and (3) some differences between the two leading common-law countries. It interrogates many key aspects of current penal systems, such as the impact of extra-legal scientific knowledge on criminal law, preventive detention, the 'dual-track' system with both traditional punishment and novel measures of security, the assessment of offenders' dangerousness, juvenile justice, and the indeterminate sentence. As a result, this study contributes to a critical understanding of some inherent contradictions characterizing criminal justice in contemporary western societies. Written in a straight-forward and direct manner, this volume will be of great interest to academics and students researching historical criminology, philosophy, political science, and legal history. Chapter 2 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
