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.

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.

Examines all the important fundamental questions of criminal liability and presents a systematic theory of criminal justice. Punishment and responsibility are given fresh and comprehensive treatment.

"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.

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.