In Search of Criminal Responsibility

Abstract

Abstract Building on Lacey's previous analysis in Women, Crime and Character (2008), this book brings together philosophical, historical, and socio-legal methods in legal scholarship. Distinguishing between ideas of responsibility as founded in character, psychological capacity, the causation of harmful outcomes or the presentation of risk, the book draws links between these ideas of responsibility; the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted, and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history. Using this framework, the book provides an analysis of the development of responsibility over time in English criminal law, and of what drives that development. We have moved from a criminal law dominated by character and outcome responsibility in the eighteenth century, through a period in which capacity responsibility was gradually established at the core of criminal law, with outcome responsibility widespread but ideologically marginal. In the current phase, character responsibility, combined with a new discourse of responsibility as founded in risk, is enjoying a renaissance. These trends are themselves produced by shifts in not only prevailing ideas but also the structure of institutions and the play of interests: hence the trajectory of criminal responsibility over time and space must be understood in the light of political economy and social theory.

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