Böcker av Nicola Lacey

Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal methodology, this volume investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law.

Criticizes the fundamental liberal philosophical assumptions underlying much of the modern tradition of theorizing about punishment. Instead, this text argues that the social functions of criminal law and punishment are justifiable.

Over the last two decades, and in the wake of increases in recorded crime and other social changes, British criminal justice policy has become increasingly politicised as an index of governments' competence. New and worrying developments, such as the inexorable rise of the US prison population and the rising force of penal severity, seem unstoppable in the face of popular anxiety about crime. But is this inevitable? Nicola Lacey argues that harsh 'penal populism' is not the inevitable fate of all contemporary democracies. Notwithstanding a degree of convergence, globalisation has left many of the key institutional differences between national systems intact, and these help to explain the striking differences in the capacity for penal tolerance in otherwise relatively similar societies. Only by understanding the institutional preconditions for a tolerant criminal justice system can we think clearly about the possible options for reform within particular systems.

H L A Hart was the pre-eminent legal philosopher of the twentieth century. This is both an intellectual and a psychological biography, following his life from modest origins as the son of Jewish tailor parents in Yorkshire to worldwide fame as the most influential English-speaking legal theorist of the post-War era.

This book presents a feminist critique of law based on an analysis of the ways in which the very structure or method of modern law is gendered.

A biography that explores the forces that shaped the life of H L A Hart, as one of the greatest legal philosophers. But behind his public success, his Jewish background, ambivalent sexuality, and unconventional marriage, all fuelled his psychological complexity; and allegations of espionage, though immediately quashed, nearly destroyed him.