New Books In Law

In her latest book, In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2016), Nicola Lacey brings together philosophical, historical and socio-legal methods to give an account of the ever changing notion of responsibility in criminal law. She distinguishes between ideas of responsibility, which she argues are founded in notions of character, psychological capacity, the causation of harmful outcomes and the presentation of risk. The book draws links between these ideas of responsibility; of the institutions that produce them, and the interests that have shaped both doctrines and institutions. In her analysis of responsibility over time, Nicola demonstrates the functions that criminal law and punishment have been required to perform at different periods in history. Criminal law has moved from notions of character and outcome responsibility in the eighteenth century, through a period dominated by capacity responsibility, which has become established as central in c