Product Description: Gathering together an impressive array of legal scholars from around the world, this book features essays on Jeremy Bentham’s major legal theoretical treatise, Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence, reassessing Bentham’s theories of law as well as his impact on jurisprudence...read more

Product Description: Contemporary philosophy still lacks a satisfying theory of punishment, one that adequately addresses our basic moral concerns. Yet, as the crisis of incarceration in the United States and elsewhere shows, the need for a deeper understanding of punishment’s purpose has never been greater...read more

Product Description: It has long been held that humans need government to impose social order on a chaotic, dangerous world. How, then, did early humans survive on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators in a harsh and forbidding environment? Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers examines an array of natural experiments and accidents of human history to explore the fundamental nature of how human beings act when beyond the scope of the law...read more

Product Description: Retribution is perhaps the most popular contemporary theory about punishment and has enjoyed enduring appeal as the oldest, even most venerable, penal theory with its strong ancient roots. Retribution is understood in many different ways, but the standard view of retribution is that punishment is justified where it is deserved and an offender should be punished in proportion to his desert...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays presents Jeffrie G. Murphy's most recent ideas on punishment, forgiveness, and the emotions of resentment, shame, guilt, remorse, love, and jealousy. In Murphy's view, conscious rationales of principle -- such as crime control or giving others what in justice they deserve -- do not always drive our decisions to punish or condemn others for wrongdoing...read more

Product Description: This book discusses the under-researched relationship between sentencing and the legitimacy of punishment. It argues that there is an increasing gap between what is perceived as legitimate punishment and the sentencing decisions of the criminal courts...read more

Product Description: We call it justice—the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the incarceration of corrupt politicians or financiers like Rod Blagojevich and Bernard Madoff, and the climactic slaying of cinema-screen villains by superheroes. But could we not also call it revenge? We are told that revenge is uncivilized and immoral, an impulse that individuals and societies should actively repress and replace with the order and codes of courtroom justice...read more

Does an offender have the right to be punished? "The right to be punished" may sound like an oxymoron, but it is not necessarily so. With the emergence of modern criminal law, the offender gained the right to be punished by rational criminal law rather than being lynched by an angry mob. The present-day offender may have the right to be punished by doctrinal sentencing rather than being subjected to verdicts based on vague, unclear, and uncertain principles. In modern criminal law, the imposition of criminal liability follows accurate and strict rules, whereas there are no similar rules for the imposition of punishment. The process of sentencing is vague and obscure, as are the considerations used for the imposition of punishments. The objective of the present book is to propose a comprehensive, general, and legally sophisticated theory of modern doctrinal sentencing. The challenges of such a legal theory are plenty and complex. In addition to increasing clarity and certainty, modern doctrinal sentencing must deal with modern types of delinquency (e.g. organized crime, recidivism, corporate offenders, high-tech offenses, etc.) and modern principles of criminal law. Modern doctrinal sentencing must serve to ensure optimal sentencing.

Product Description: In most Western penal systems, recidivist criminals are punished more harshly than first offenders. The philosophical grounds for this response are however difficult to grasp. According to the retributive ideal, recidivists deserve harsher punishments, independently of the eventual effects of the recidivist premium on crime rates...read more

Product Description: For nearly two centuries in the United States, the punishment of crime was largely aimed, in theory and in practice, at prevention, rehabilitation or incapacitation, and deterrence. In the mid-1970s, a sharp-and some argued permanent-shift occurred...read more

Product Description: Are there distinctive postmodern forms of punishment? Is the contemporary 'punitive' turn in the United States a sign of things to come in Europe? Is modern rationality at odds with violence, or the means to applying violence systematically? Punitive States links together these key contemporary debates in criminology, penology and social theory and offers an alternative analysis inspired by Georges Bataille and Rene Girard...read more

Product Description: What does the institution of punishment look like in an ideal political system? Is punishment merely an exercise of violence of the strong against the weak? And what does the phenomenon of revealed religion add to the understanding of punishment? These are some of the many questions contemplated in The Philosophy of Punishment and the History of Political Thought, which provides a provocative exploration of the contributions of nine major thinkers and traditions regarding the question of punitive justice...read more

Product Description: For many years, Antony Duff has been one of the world's foremost philosophers of criminal law. This volume collects essays by leading criminal law theorists to explore the principal themes in his work. In a response to the essays, Duff clarifies and develops his position on central problems in criminal law theory...read more

Product Description: Punishment is the imposition, by a legitimate authority, of a painful consequence upon one who has offended the social order by indulging in acts contrary to the social good. Punishment is understood to serve a primary objective in any society: it rehabilitates or reforms (re-forms or shapes anew) the psyches of social offenders to bring them in line with prevailing codes of behavior...read more

Product Description: Why should a Spanish court take jurisdiction over an American lawyer accused of facilitating torture on Guantanamo Bay? What empowers a London magistrate to sign an arrest warrant for a former Chilean President? Can it be legitimate or morally defensible for an Israeli court to try a former Nazi whose crimes occurred outside Israel and indeed prior to the establishment of Israel? This book provides the first full account, explanation, and critique of extraterritorial punishment in international law...read more