Marc O. DeGirolami has a new piece on SSRN called The Punishment Jurist. It will be a chapter in a forthcoming Oxford University Press booked called Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law. Here is the abstract:
This is an essay on the critical history of the thought of the Victorian-era judge, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. It discusses some of the themes in his major work, “The History of the Criminal Law of England.” And it reflects on a cluster of questions involving criminal punishment: whether Stephen had a “theory” of punishment; if not how best to characterize his thought; and whether his views and understanding of the aims and functions of punishment remain relevant. The essay explores Stephen’s positive and critical contributions, and it concludes that Stephen’s major insight was methodological. His view is that the reasons for punishment cannot be separated from the obligations and the nature of the judicial office. He was neither a punishment retributivist nor a punishment consequentialist, but a punishment jurist.
You can download the full piece here.
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