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Reconstructing Beccaria's Social ContractIn Antje Du Bois-Pedain & Shaḥar Eldar (eds.), Re-reading Beccaria: on the contemporary significance of a penal classic, Hart. 2022.
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8Why Criminalize?: New Perspectives on Normative Principles of Criminalization, written by Thomas Søbirk PetersenDanish Yearbook of Philosophy 1-3. forthcoming.
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12Criminal Justice and the Liberal StateIn Matthew C. Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 335-355. 2022.The chapter concerns the relationship between the justification of criminal law and punishment and the justification of the state. It briefly surveys the debate between retributivists and consequentialists and argues that both are inappropriate when it comes to state punishment. It next turns to arguments by Vincent Chiao, Malcolm Thorburn, and Antony Duff that locate criminal law and punishment in public law. The final parts of the chapter develop an account of criminal law and punishment as be…Read more
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Who's still standing?' a comment on Antony Duff's preconditions of criminal liabilityIn Thom Brooks (ed.), Law and Legal Theory, Brill. 2013.
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Rootless desert and unanchored censureIn Antje du Bois-Pedain & Anthony E. Bottoms (eds.), Penal censure: engagements within and beyond desert theory, Hart Publishing. 2019.
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Reconstructing Beccaria's Social ContractIn Antje Du Bois-Pedain & Shaḥar Eldar (eds.), Re-reading Beccaria: on the contemporary significance of a penal classic, Hart. 2022.
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9The Criminal Law's Person (edited book)Hart Publishing. 2022.The state's use of the threat, and imposition, of punishments to regulate conduct is thought (or at least said) by many to be legitimised by the idea that the criminal law's burdens only fall on those who are blameworthy for their conduct. However, the formal concept of 'blameworthiness' needs to be made substantive. This puts various ideas regarding the criminal law's person at the heart of debates about blame, guilt, and responsibility. How is the criminal law's person constructed, by whom, an…Read more
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13Justice and Coercion in the PandemicNetherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy 50 (2): 263-269. 2021.
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20Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy beyond Liberalism and CommunitarianismMind 113 (451): 539-541. 2004.
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130‘Who’s Still Standing?’ A Comment on Antony Duff’s Preconditions of Criminal LiabilityJournal of Moral Philosophy 3 (3): 320-330. 2006.Antony Duff has argued that an important precondition of criminal liability is that the state has the moral standing to call the offender to account. Conditions of severe social injustice, if allowed or perpetuated by the state, can undermine this standing. Duffs argument appeals to the ordinary idea that a persons own behaviour can sometimes negate his standing to call others to account. It is argued that this is an important issue, but that the analogy with individual standing is problematic…Read more
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75What's 'Wrong' in Contractualism?Utilitas 8 (3): 329. 1996.Brian Barry's Justice as Impartiality is an important book. One of its contributions to the discipline is a characteristically clear presentation of what follows if one accepts a commitment to equality, and the reasonableness of continuing and profound disagreements about the nature of the good life. I take the argument of Justice as Impartiality to be an important next step in the attempt to give an account of the content of justice which is impartial, fair, or neutral between conceptions of th…Read more
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20What Is It Like to Be an Alien?Journal of Applied Philosophy 34 (5): 743-749. 2017.This brief article is concerned with an aspect of Jonathan Glover's book, Alien Landscapes?. After reflecting a little on the book as a whole, the question that is taken up is, ‘Why might a book that seeks to help those without mental disorders understand what they are like “from the inside” be of interest to laymen and practitioners in the criminal law?’. One answer lies in part in the way that ‘what it is like from the inside’ might interact with judgements of criminal responsibility. Taking i…Read more
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42Symposium on Michelle Madden Dempsey, Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical AnalysisCriminal Law and Philosophy 8 (3): 527-528. 2014.Michelle Madden Dempsey’s Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical Analysis (2009) is an important book for many reasons. Amongst these are the prevalence of domestic violence and the extraordinary, largely unaccountable discretionary powers wielded by prosecutors in the United States. Against this background, Dempsey asks in particular what prosecutors should do when the victims of domestic violence withdraw their support from the proposed prosecution. In Prosecuting Domestic Violence, De…Read more
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20The culture of control: readings and responsesCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 7 (2): 1-4. 2004.(2004). The culture of control: readings and responses. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 7, The Culture of Control, pp. 1-4. doi: 10.1080/1369823042000266486
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1Simone Chambers and Will Kymlicka, eds., Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 24 (1): 20-21. 2004.
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42Symposium on Andrew Simester and Andreas von Hirsch, Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs: On the Principles of CriminalisationCriminal Law and Philosophy 10 (2): 297-299. 2016.Andrew Simester and Andreas von Hirsch’s Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs: On the Principles of Criminalisation (Simester and von Hirsch 2011) is an important contribution to the philosophical debate over the nature and ethical limits of criminalisation. As they note in their reply in this symposium, one of the novel aspects of their account is that they do not advance one “unified, grand theory”. Rather, they analyse each ground of criminal prohibition—wrongfulness, harm-based, offense, and paternalis…Read more
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11Punishment and Political Theory (edited book)Hart Publishing. 1999.This book brings together moral and legal philosophers,criminologists and political theorists in an attempt to address the interdependence of the study of punishment and of political theory as well as specific issues, such as freedom, autonomy, coercion and rights that arise in both. In addition to new essays on the compatibility of rights and utilitarianism and of autonomy and coercion in Kant's theory, the book contains an extended treatment of the idea of punishment as communication. This the…Read more
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66Political Neutrality and PunishmentCriminal Law and Philosophy 7 (2): 217-230. 2013.This paper is concerned with the tensions that arise when one juxtaposes one important liberal understanding of the nature and use of state power in circumstances of pluralism and (broadly) retributive accounts of punishment. The argument is that there are aspects of the liberal theory that seem to be in tension with aspects of retributive punishment, and that these tensions are difficult to avoid because of the attractiveness of precisely those features of each account. However, a proper unders…Read more
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9Policies, law and psychopathy: a critical stance from political philosophyIn Luca Malatesti & John McMillan (eds.), Responsibility and Psychopathy: Interfacing Law, Psychiatry and Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 63. 2010.
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111Scanlon and contractualism (edited book)Frank Cass. 2003.This collection brings together essays which reflect on the detailed arguments of "What We Owe to Each Other", and which comment critically both on Scanlon's contractualism and his revised understandings of motivation and morality. The essays illustrate the uses of Scanlon's contractualism by applying it to moral and political problems and in so doing they provide an assessment of the ability of Scanlon's contractualism by applying it to other forms of ethical theory. So, the central questions a…Read more
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12Responsibility and choiceCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (2): 77-92. 2002.
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23Legitimate Expectations in Theory, Practice, and PunishmentMoral Philosophy and Politics 4 (2): 307-323. 2017.This paper is concerned with how we ought to think about legitimate expectations in the non-ideal, ‘real’ world. In one (dominant) strand of contemporary theories of justice, justice requires not that each gets what she deserves, but that each gets that to which she is entitled in accordance with what Rawls calls ‘the public rules that specify the scheme of cooperation’. However, that is true only if those public rules are part of a fully just scheme and it is plausibly the case that no such sch…Read more
York, York, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Law |
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Law |