Justice Liability And Blame

This book examines shared intuitive notions of justice among laypersons and compares the discovered principles to those instantiated in American criminal codes. It reports eighteen original studies on a wide range of issues that are central to criminal law formulation.

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.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence We live in a society that is increasingly preoccupied with allocating blame: when something goes wrong someone must be to blame. Bringing together philosophical, psychological, and sociological accounts of blame, this is the first detailed criminological account of the role of blame in which the authors present a novel study of the legal process of blame attribution, set in the context of criminalisation as a social and political process. This timely and topical book will be essential reading for anyone working or researching in the criminal justice field. It will also be of wider interest to anyone wishing to discover the role of blame in modern society.

Hyman Gross, in his "A Theory of Criminal Justice," sets forth his conception of criminal justice as social criticism and depicts it as the only view that "makes sense of the criminal jurisprudence that guides the law in any modern legal system." (3) The three stages of criminal justice so conceived, the accusatory, the testing (of the accusation), and the condemnatory, are all guided by "social rules of the highest authority-the law. . ." (4, and it is by reference to such rules that critical judgments peculiar to each stage are made.

Contemporary concern about technological hazards posed by business enterprises has intensified interest in the criminality of corporations. Incorporating ideas from a wide range of literature, the book argues that there is no magic answer to corporate power, to issues of personal safety and their inter-relationship with criminal law and justice. The attention paid to corporate criminal liability by courts, legislatures, law reform bodies and international organizations has increased markedly in the past decade. As in the first edition, the book takes what might be called a panoptic approach to the subject. Corporations and their susceptibility to criminal law are examined from sociological, psychological, philosophical and organizational perspectives as the book progresses. This edition has been revised and updated to take account of the burgeoning scholarly literature. Detailed analysis of judicial and legislative movements in England and Wales, in other national jurisdictions and at the level of international organizations follows. Two new chapters, on corporate manslaughter and on comparative and international responses to corporate crime, accommodate these changes. The book is distinctive in combining legal analysis and discussion of law reform debates with a theoretical account of the relationship between legal institutions and the role of risk and blame in shaping criminal law and the practices of the criminal justice system.

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 is Moore'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 so systematically to criminal law theory. As such, this innovative, new book will be of great interest to all scholars in this field.

This book is a ... for thoughtful legislators and all the rest of us who seek justice for persons charged with crimes-proportional punishment of the guilty, and exculpation of the morally blameless. The authors demonstrate, with remarkable lucidity, how and why the criminal law sometimes deliberately sacrifices justice for other goals, and they provide thoughtful, controversial, and often persuasive suggestions on how we can redesign our legal system to give people their just deserts. [In the book, the authors offer an] account of how the American criminal justice system fails to give offenders their just deserts in a number of different contexts. From the refusal to allow partial exoneration for defenses like mistake of law and insanity to the practicallimitations on detecting and prosecuting offenders, [they also] demonstrate through ... discussions of actual cases the many areas where criminal sentencing fails to do justice. -Dust jacket.