Nicola Lacey, In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions
| Pages | 133-134 |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Published date | 01 January 2017 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2017.0400 |
| Author |
This volume is the culmination of several years' engagement by one of today's leading scholars with perhaps the foremost issue in criminal law: what makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable to punishment? Writ small, Lacey's thesis is that responsibility serves to legitimise the criminal law and to facilitate its coordination of social behaviour. She argues that these two core functions pose different challenges and engender divergent responses in different times and places. In other words, responsibility has no metaphysical essence that can be captured; as a concept, it is rooted in historical and cultural specificities. By advancing these arguments, Lacey aims to provide a counternarrative to what she perceives to be the dominant voice in debates over criminal responsibility: that of legal and moral philosophers. The fact that fewer publications adopting this philosophical approach are cited than those adopting the interdisciplinary, historical approach Lacey advocates (10–11) throws some doubt on this perception, but it also testifies to the impact her work has had on the field.
In the first three substantive chapters of the book, Lacey chronicles the development of criminal responsibility within English law from the eighteenth century through to the present. She structures her narrative around four conceptions of responsibility – capacity, character, outcome and risk – taking account of the three forces she considers to have most powerfully shaped the patterns and practices of responsibility attribution: ideas, interests and institutions. She provides case studies to illustrate each of these influences, postulating connections between the composition of responsibility and shifts in prevailing political, economic and social conditions. Restricting her analysis in this way serves to contain what is a formidably ambitious undertaking. Her selection of ideas and interests also serves to narrow the focus. In the chapter dedicated to ideas, Lacey hones in on conceptions of the self and human nature, the growth of psychological and social sciences, the emergence of Utilitarianism, the relationship between the individual and the state and gender. With approximately a page dedicated to each theme, these developments are sketched with necessarily broad strokes. Similarly, the chapter on interests provides a brief overview of the economic, professional, political and cultural or symbolic powers that Lacey deems most salient.
In the various case...
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