Re-Reading Beccaria
Re-Reading Beccaria

Author: Antje du Bois-Pedain

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-10-06

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1509959157

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Cesare Beccaria's slim 1764 volume On Crimes and Punishments influenced policy developments worldwide and over decades, if not centuries, after its publication. For those who turn to Beccaria's work today, the encounter is shaped by that knowledge. Appreciative of On Crimes and Punishments' dual nature as historical document and repository of ideas, the contributions in this collection address different aspects of the criminal justice theory Beccaria offered his readers and face up to methodological questions raised by meeting a historical text of this kind – unsystematic and by modern standards often under-argued – with modern scholarly conventions in mind. Contributions in the first part of the book engage with Beccaria's political theory of criminal justice through the lenses of political and penal philosophy, considering how Beccaria's blending of social-contractarian foundations and proto-utilitarian policy analysis interlinks with the concrete set of criminal justice practices Beccaria presents as justified. This leads on to the second part where contributors approach Beccaria's ideas with present-day reforms and developments in mind. Many of his policy proposals and arguments remain significant from our contemporary perspective, their limitations and omissions proving as instructive for the contemporary scholar as their more prescient elements. The third part offers those looking at Beccaria's work today a glimpse into the practical difficulties facing the firebrand author turned public servant during his long career in the Habsburg-Lombardian administration. It puts his work into the broader context of pathways to criminal justice reform in northern Italy, Habsburgian Lombardy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Beccaria's day.

An Essay on Crimes and Punishments
An Essay on Crimes and Punishments

Author: Cesare Beccaria

Publisher: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1584776382

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Reprint of the fourth edition, which contains an additional text attributed to Voltaire. Originally published anonymously in 1764, Dei Delitti e Delle Pene was the first systematic study of the principles of crime and punishment. Infused with the spirit of the Enlightenment, its advocacy of crime prevention and the abolition of torture and capital punishment marked a significant advance in criminological thought, which had changed little since the Middle Ages. It had a profound influence on the development of criminal law in Europe and the United States.

Re-Reading Beccaria
Re-Reading Beccaria

Author: Antje du Bois-Pedain

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-10-06

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1509959149

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Cesare Beccaria's slim 1764 volume On Crimes and Punishments influenced policy developments worldwide and over decades, if not centuries, after its publication. For those who turn to Beccaria's work today, the encounter is shaped by that knowledge. Appreciative of On Crimes and Punishments' dual nature as historical document and repository of ideas, the contributions in this collection address different aspects of the criminal justice theory Beccaria offered his readers and face up to methodological questions raised by meeting a historical text of this kind – unsystematic and by modern standards often under-argued – with modern scholarly conventions in mind. Contributions in the first part of the book engage with Beccaria's political theory of criminal justice through the lenses of political and penal philosophy, considering how Beccaria's blending of social-contractarian foundations and proto-utilitarian policy analysis interlinks with the concrete set of criminal justice practices Beccaria presents as justified. This leads on to the second part where contributors approach Beccaria's ideas with present-day reforms and developments in mind. Many of his policy proposals and arguments remain significant from our contemporary perspective, their limitations and omissions proving as instructive for the contemporary scholar as their more prescient elements. The third part offers those looking at Beccaria's work today a glimpse into the practical difficulties facing the firebrand author turned public servant during his long career in the Habsburg-Lombardian administration. It puts his work into the broader context of pathways to criminal justice reform in northern Italy, Habsburgian Lombardy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Beccaria's day.

Early Utilitarians
Early Utilitarians

Author: Ken Binmore

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-09-11

Total Pages: 95

ISBN-13: 303074583X

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People who put the public good before their own self interest have been admired throughout history. But what is the public good? Sages and prophets who think they know better what is good for us than we know ourselves held sway on this subject for more than two thousand years. The world had to wait for the Enlightenment that burst upon the world in the eighteenth century for an account of the public good free from the prejudices of the privileged classes. Utilitarianism is our name for this new way of thinking about morality. Francis Hutcheson encapsulated its aims by inventing its catchphrase “The greatest happiness for the greatest number’’ fifty years before Jeremy Bentham, to whom the slogan is usually attributed. But what is happiness? Why did Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill prefer to speak of utility? How did economists develop this notion? Does it really make sense to compare the utilities of different people? Bob may complain more than Alice in the dentist’s chair, but is he really suffering more? Why should I put the sum of everybody’s utility before my own utility? This short book asks how such questions arose from the social and political realities of the times in which the early utilitarians lived. Nobody need fear being crushed by heavy metaphysical reasoning or incomprehensible algebra when this story is told. This book argues that the answers to all the questions that the early utilitarians found so difficult are transparent when we stand upon their shoulders to look back upon their work. The problem for the early utilitarians was to free themselves from the prejudices of their time. The lesson for us is perhaps that we too need to free ourselves from the prejudices of our own time.

Penal Censure
Penal Censure

Author: Antje du Bois-Pedain

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-04-04

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 1509919791

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This exploration of penal censure is inspired by the 40th anniversary of the publication of Andreas von Hirsch's Doing Justice, which opened up a fresh set of issues in theorisation about punishment that eventually led von Hirsch to ground his proposed model of desert-based sentencing on the notion of penal censure. Von Hirsch's work thus provides an obvious starting-point for an exploration of the importance of censure for the justification of punishment, both within his theory of just deserts and from the perspectives of other theoretical approaches. It also provides an opportunity for engaging with censure more broadly from philosophical, sociological–anthropological and individual–psychological perspectives. The essays in this collection map the conceptual territory of censure from these different perspectives, address issues for desert theory that arise from fuller understandings of censure, and consider afresh the role of censure within the jurisprudence of punishment. They show that analyses of censure from different vantage points can significantly enrich punishment theory, not least by providing a conceptual basis for perceiving common ground between and thus connecting different strands of penal theory.

Criminal Law and the Authority of the State
Criminal Law and the Authority of the State

Author: Antje du Bois-Pedain

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-05-04

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1509905146

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How does the state, as a public authority, relate to those under its jurisdiction through the criminal law? Connecting the ways in which criminal lawyers, legal theorists, public lawyers and criminologists address questions of the criminal law's legitimacy, contributors to this collection explore issues such as criminal law-making and jurisdiction; the political-ethical underpinnings of legitimate criminal law enforcement; the offence of treason; the importance of doctrinal guidance in the application of criminal law; the interface between tort and crime; and the purposes and mechanisms of state punishment. Overall, the collection aims to enhance and deepen our understanding of criminal law by conceiving of the practices of criminal justice as explicitly and distinctly embedded in the project of liberal self-governance.

On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings
On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings

Author: Cesare Beccaria

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2009-05-05

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1442691050

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Published in 1764, On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) courted both success and controversy in Europe and North America. Enlightenment luminaries and enlightened monarchs alike lauded the text and looked to it for ideas that might help guide the various reform projects of the day. The equality of every citizen before the law, the right to a fair trial, the abolition of the death penalty, the elimination of the use of torture in criminal interrogations—these are but a few of the vital arguments articulated by Beccaria. This volume offers a new English translation of On Crimes and Punishment alongside writings by a number of Beccaria’s contemporaries. Of particular interest is Voltaire’s commentary on the text, which is included in its entirety. The supplementary materials testify not only to the power and significance of Beccaria’s ideas, but to the controversial reception of his book. At the same time that philosophes proclaimed that it contained principles of enduring importance to any society grappling with matters of political and criminal justice, allies of the ancien régime roundly denounced it, fearing that the book’s attack on feudal privileges and its call to separate law from religion (and thus crime from sin) would undermine their longstanding privileges and powers. Long appreciated as a foundational text in criminology, Beccaria’s arguments have become central in debates over capital punishment. This new edition presents Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments as an important and influential work of Enlightenment political theory.