When should someone who may have intentionally or knowingly committed criminal wrongdoing be excused? Excusing Crime examines what excusing conditions are, and why familiar excuses, such as duress, are thought to fulfil those conditions. The 'classical' view of excuses sees them as rational defects (such as mistake) in the motive force behind an action, but contrasts them with 'denials of responsibility', such as insanity, where the rational defect in that motive force is attributable to a mental defect in the agent him- or herself. This classical view of excuses has a long heritage, and is enshrined in different forms in many of the world's criminal codes, both liberal and non-liberal; however, in this book, Jeremy Horder contends that it is now time to move beyond it. Horder develops a 'liberal' account of excuses, arguing that the 'classical' distinction between rational defects and 'denials of responsibility' is too sharp, and also that the classical view of excuses is too narrow. He contends that it can be right to treat claims as excusatory even if they rely on a combination of elements of rational defect in the motive force behind the action, even if that defect is in part attributable to a mental deficiency in the agent him or herself ('diminished capacity'). Further, he argues that there can be a sound case for excuse even when people can give full rational assent to their actions, such as when they could not reasonably have been expected to do more than what they did to avoid committing wrongdoing ('due diligence'), or, more rarely, when their conscience understandably left them with no moral freedom to do other than commit the wrong ('demands-of-conscience').

Technological linkages between justice and law enforcement agencies are radically altering criminal process and access to justice for prisoners. Video links, integral to an increasingly networked justice matrix, enable the custodial appearance of prisoners in remote courts and are becoming the dominant form of court appearance for incarcerated defendants. This book argues that the incorporation of such technologies into prisons is not without consequence: technologies make a critical difference to prisoners' experiences of criminal justice. By focusing on the prison endpoint and engaging with the population most affected by video links - the prisoners themselves - this book interrogates the legal and conceptual shifts brought about by the technology's displacement of physical court appearance. The central argument is that custodial appearance has created a heightened zone of demarcation between prisoners and courtroom participants. This demarcation is explored through the transformed spatial, corporeal and visual relationships. The cumulative demarcations challenge procedural justice and profoundly recompose prisoners' legal experiences in ways not necessarily recognised by policy-makers.

Former bank manager Ronald Dalton never got to watch his three young children grow up. In 1989 he was convicted for a crime that never happened. His wife, Brenda, was later ruled to have choked to death on breakfast cereal not strangled as a pathologist had initially claimed. Dalton's daughter, Alison, was in kindergarten when he was charged with second-degree murder in 1988. He attended her high school graduation on June 26, 2000, two days after his conviction was finally overturned.

Behind the proud facade of Canada's criminal justice system lie the shattered lives of the people unjustly caught within its web. Justice Miscarried tells the heartwrenching stories of twelve innocent Canadians, including David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, Clayton Johnson, William Mullins-Johnson, and Thomas Sophonow, who were wrongly convicted and the errors in the nations justice system that changed their lives forever.

This book systematically and concisely expounds the construction process of China's legal system since China's reform and opening-up. Chapter 1 defines the legal system in China and describes the development of China's legal system from 1949 to 1978. Chapter 2 introduces China's legislative system, including its historical development, division of legislative functions and power, and legislative procedures. Chapter 3 compares the differences between the law systems of other countries and China's law system and how other law systems in the world influences the law system in China. Chapter 4 studies China's constitutional law system, including its historical development, forms of law and enforcement of the constitution. Chapter 5 introduces China's administrative legal system, including main principles, administrative legislation and administrative compensation. Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9 describe China's civil and commercial legal system, China's economic legal system, China's social legal system and China's criminal legal system respectively. Chapter 10 introduces China's legal system in litigation and non-litigation procedure in terms of criminal, civil, administrative and non-litigation procedures. Chapter 11 analyses the legal system of the special administrative regions in China and its relationship with China's legal system. The last chapter, Chapter 12 studies the relationship between the international law and China's domestic law system.

This collection explores the stakes, risks and opportunities invoked in opening and exploring law's archive and re-examining law's evidence. It draws together work exploring how evidence is used or mis-used during the legal process, and re-used after the law's work has concluded by engaging with ethical, aesthetic or emotional dimensions of using law's evidence. Within socio-legal discourse, the move towards 'open justice' has emerged concurrently with a much broader cultural sensibility, one that has been called the "archival turn" (Ann Laura Stoler), the "archival impulse" (Hal Foster) and "archive fever" (Jacques Derrida). Whilst these terms do not describe exactly the same phenomena, they collectively acknowledge the process by which we create a fetish of the stored document. The archive facilitates our material confrontation with history, historicity, order, linearity, time and bureaucracy. For lawyers, artists, journalists, publishers, curators and scholars, the document in the archive has the attributes of authenticity, contemporaneity, and the unique tangibility of a real moment captured in material form. These attributes form the basis for the strict interpretive limits imposed by the rules of evidence and procedure. These rules do not contain the other attributes of the archival document, those that make it irresistible as the basis for creative work: beauty, violence, surprise, shame, volume, and the promise that it contains a tantalising secret. This book was previously published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Law Journal.

In Justice in Extreme Cases, Darryl Robinson argues that the encounter between criminal law theory and international criminal law (ICL) can be illuminating in two directions: criminal law theory can challenge and improve ICL, and conversely, ICL's novel puzzles can challenge and improve mainstream criminal law theory. Robinson recommends a 'coherentist' method for discussions of principles, justice and justification. Coherentism recognizes that prevailing understandings are fallible, contingent human constructs. This book will be a valuable resource to scholars and jurists in ICL, as well as scholars of criminal law theory and legal philosophy.

In the mid 1980s, there was a crisis in the availability, affordability, and adequacy of liability insurance in the United States and Canada. Mass tort claims such as the asbestos, DES, and Agent Orange litigation generated widespread public attention, and the tort system came to assume a heightened prominence in American life. While some scholars debate whether or not any such crisis still exists, there has been an increasing political, judicial and academic questioning of the goals and future of the tort system.
Exploring the Domain of Tort Law reviews the evidence on the efficacy of the tort system and its alternatives. By looking at empirical evidence in five major categories of accidents--automobile, medical malpractice, product-related accidents, environmental injuries, and workplace injuries--the authors evaluate the degree to which the tort system conforms to three normative goals: deterrence, corrective justice, and distributive justice. In each case, the authors review the deterrence and compensatory properties of the tort system, and then review parallel bodies of evidence on regulatory, penal, and compensatory alternatives.
Most of the academic literature on the tort system has traditionally been doctrinal or, in recent years, highly theoretical. Very little of this literature provides an in-depth consideration of how the system works, and whether or not there are any feasible alternatives. Exploring the Domain of TortLaw contributes valuable new evidence to the tort law reform debate. It will be of interest to academic lawyers and economists, policy analysts, policy professionals in government and research organizations, and all those affected by tort law reform.

In the Japanese criminal justice system, the prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other figure. Prosecutors make critical decisions about "who gets what" in Japan, chiefly by monopolizing decisions as to who will be charged with crimes, and for what. Based on extensive fieldwork inside a large prosecutors office in Japan and on numerous surveys and interviews, Johnson presents the first in-depth study in any language to describe and explain the role of Japan's 2000 prosecutors, the contexts in which they work, and the formidable powers they individually and collectively exercise.

Winner of the 2017 British Society of Criminology Book Prize The penal voluntary sector and the relationships between punishment and charity are more topical than ever before in countries around the world. In recent years in England and Wales, the sector has featured significantly in both policy rhetoric and academic commentary. Penal voluntary organisations are increasingly delivering prison and probation services under contract, and this role is set to expand. However, the diverse voluntary organisations which comprise the sector, their varied relationships with statutory agencies and the effects of such work remain very poorly understood. This book provides a wide-ranging and rigorous examination of this policy-relevant but complex and little studied area. It explores what voluntary organisations are doing with prisoners and probationers, how they manage to undertake their work, and the effects of charitable work with prisoners and probationers. The author uses original empirical research and an innovative application of actor-network theory to enable a step change in our understanding of this increasingly significant sector, and develops the policy-centric accounts produced in the last decade to illustrate how voluntary organisations can mediate the experiences of imprisonment and probation at the micro and macro levels. Demonstrating how the legacy of philanthropic work and neoliberal policy reforms over the past thirty years have created a complex three-tier penal voluntary sector of diverse organisations, this cutting-edge interdisciplinary text will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists of work and industry, and those engaged in the voluntary sector.

Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world and second in South Asia, is known for its natural disasters, floods and political violence. However, the country plans to become a middle-income country by 2020 due to rapid economic growth led by strong and vibrant garments and pharmaceutical sectors. A developing country, Bangladesh cannot reach its true potential if there is a weak legal system and the executive have no regard for the rule of law. This book discusses and analyses the legal system of Bangladesh. It studies the various weaknesses and whether the judiciary of the country is really independent. International experts, scholars and lawyers with significant experience of working in Bangladesh and at international agencies and universities examine the role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law in the country and the critical role it can play in strengthening democracy. The chapters show the various roles played by the judiciary in promoting its independence and thereby strengthening democracy in the country. The first book to analyse the role of the judiciary and the various weaknesses in the legal system of Bangladesh, it is a relevant case study in the context of developing countries. The problems found in the legal system of Bangladesh prevail in most of the developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The book will be of interest to academics in the field of development studies, South Asian Studies and Asian Law.

A call to replace Canada's incarceration model, which has proven destructive, discriminatory, expensive, counterproductive, and - most of all - unnecessary. Imprisonment developed in the Western world as the punishment to suit all offences, from violent assault to victimless drug use. Centuries ago, incarcerating convicts represented progress on society's part, since it came as a replacement for capital punishment, maiming, and torture. Our current model - taking away convicts' freedom and holding them in degrading and unhealthy prison conditions - promotes recidivism and jeopardizes public safety. It is highly discriminatory, with disproportionate numbers of ethnic, indigenous, mentally ill, drug-dependent, poor, and otherwise marginalized people imprisoned. It is also ruinously expensive. Elsewhere, alternative correctional systems successfully rehabilitate offenders while treating them with dignity and respect. This book lays out the case for a complete overhaul of Canada's ineffective incarceration model of criminal justice and for a new approach.

Since its inception, the European Union (EU) has revised its foundational treaties several times, resulting in national ratification processes involving different actors, with varying success. This book focuses on the politics of ratification of EU Treaties and reviews the processes of ratification of EU primary legislation. Existing research and academic debate on EU constitutional politics have almost exclusively focussed on negotiation of new treaties and their institutional setting. However, this book explains how the result of ratification was achieved, and analyses the strategy that actors pursue across Europe. Ratification of the Treaty of Maastricht and the EU Constitution failed totally, whilst other ratification can be considered partial failures such as the Irish Nice and Lisbon referendums. As the EU Constitution has proved, the ratification process may have deep effects unforeseen during the processes of negotiation. In recent years, ratification has produced some of the most intense debates on national membership of the EU and the EU itself. The Politics of Ratification of EU Treaties will be of interest to students and researchers of European Studies, European Union studies, European Union Law and European Union Politics.

Fines and monetary damages account for the majority of legal sanctions across the whole spectrum of legal governance. Money is, in key respects, the primary tool law has to achieve compliance. Yet money has largely been ignored by social analyses of law, and especially by social theory. The Currency of Justice examines the differing rationalities, aims and assumptions built into money's deployment in diverse legal fields and sanctions. This raises major questions about the extent to which money appears as an abstract universal or whether it takes on more particular meanings when deployed in various areas of law. Indeed, money may be unique in that it can take on the meanings of punishment, compensation, denunciation or regulation. The Currency of Justice examines the implications of the 'monetization of justice' as life is increasingly regulated through this single medium. Money not only links diverse domains of law; it also links legal sanctions to other monetary techniques which govern everyday life. Like these, the concern with monetary sanctions is not who pays, but that money is paid. Money is perhaps the only form of legal sanction where the burden need not be borne by the wrongdoer. In this respect, this book explores the view that contemporary governance is less concerned with disciplining individuals and more concerned with regulating distributions and flows of behaviours and the harms and costs linked with these.

The ideal companion to developing the essential skills needed to undertake the core module of English Legal System as part of undergraduate study of law or a qualifying GDL/CPE conversion course. Providing support for learning and revision throughout, the key skills are demonstrated in the context of the core topics of study with expertly written example sets of notes, followed by opportunities to learn and test your knowledge by creating and maintaining your own summaries of the key points. The chapters are reinforced with a series of workpoints to test your analytical, communication and organisational skills; checkpoints, to test recall of the essential facts; and research points, to practice self-study and to gain familiarity with legal sources. Course Notes: the English Legal System is designed for those keen to succeed in examinations and assessments with view to taking you one step further towards the development of the professional skills required for your later career. In addition, concepts are set out both verbally and in diagrammatic form for clarity, and the essential case law is displayed in a series of straightforward and indisposable tables illustrating how best to analyse and compare legal points as expressed by the opinions of the authorities in each case. To check your answers to questions examples are provided online along with sample essay plans and web links to useful web sites and sources at www.unlockingthelaw.co.uk, making this the ideal resource to guide you through the demands of compiling and revising the information you will need for your exams.

"Evidence management has become a crucial component for the law enforcement community. I truly believe this book is essential in assisting criminal investigators and a valuable resource for managing evidence."-Jeremiah Sullivan, Chairman, Board of Directors, Texas Division of the International Association for Identification; Senior Crime Scene Specialist (Retired). Austin Police Department As technology and technical applications continue to advance in the forensic sciences, the undertakings at crime scenes have become even more critical. Crime scene investigators must ensure that evidence is properly collected, document, packaged, and stored in a manner that maximizes the ability of laboratories to derive meaning and results from the evidence provided them. Forensic Evidence Management: From the Crime Scene to the Courtroom provides best practices policies for forensic science entities and their employees to maintain chain of custody and evidence integrity throughout the course of evidence collection, storage, preservation, and processing. The focus of the book will be to address the issues related with evidence handling and analysis inside the forensic laboratory, in particular, and to offer best practices and guidelines from leading forensic experts in the field. Forms of evidence covered include biological, chemical, trace, firearm, toolmark, fingerprint, and a host of others types recovered at crime scenes. The book concludes with a chapter on ethics, bias, and ethical practices in evidence handling in the field and laboratory analysis. Test Bank and PowerPointTM slides are available for download from the Taylor & Francis ancillary Web site for qualifying course adopters.

Environmental mediation continues to develop and evolve in different jurisdictions across the world in order to prevent potential environmental conflicts or to resolve the conflicts while avoiding the inherent drawbacks of an adjudicated solution. This book takes a comparative approach to explore the legal framework of environmental mediation with a focus on the judicial, administrative and private procedures and the criteria for accrediting mediators in a range of jurisdictions across the world. It also examines practical considerations for environmental mediators while analysing the effectiveness of different mediation processes.

Virtually every constitutional order in the common law world contains a provision for executive clemency or pardon in criminal cases. This facility for legal mercy is not limited to a single place in modern legal systems, but is instead realized through various practices such as a law enforcement officer's decision to arrest, a prosecutor's decision to prosecute, and a judge's decision to convict and sentence. Doubts about legal mercy in any form as unfair, unguided, or arbitrary are as ubiquitous as the exercise of mercy itself. This book presents a comparative analysis of the clemency and pardon power in the common law world. Andrew Novak compares the modern development, organization, and practice of constitutional and statutory schemes of clemency and pardon in the United Kingdom, United States, and Commonwealth jurisdictions. He asks whether the bureaucratization of the clemency power is in line with global trends, and explores how innovations in legislative involvement, judicial review, and executive consultation have made the mercy and pardon procedure more transparent. The book concludes with a discussion on the future of the clemency and pardon power given the decline of the death penalty in the Commonwealth and the rise of the modern institution of parole. As a work concerned with the practice of mercy in the common law world, this book will be of great interest to researchers and students of international and comparative criminal justice and international human rights law.

Accusing someone of committing a crime arrests everyday social relations and unfurls processes that decide on who to admit to criminal justice networks. Accusation demarcates specific subjects as the criminally accused, who then face courtroom trials, and possible punishment. It inaugurates a crime's historical journey into being with sanctioned accusers successfully making criminal allegations against accused persons in the presence of authorized juridical agents. Given this decisive role in the production of criminal identities, it is surprising that criminal accusation has received relatively short shrift in sociological, socio-legal and criminological discourses. In this book, George Pavlich redresses this oversight by framing a socio-legal field directed to political rationales and practices of criminal accusation. The focus of its interrogation is the truth-telling powers of an accusatory lore that creates subjects within the confines of socially authorized spaces. And, in this respect, the book has two overarching aims in mind. First, it names and analyses powers of criminal accusation - its history, rationales, rites and effects - as an enduring gateway to criminal justice. Second, the book evaluates the prospects for limiting and/or changing apparatuses of criminal accusation. By understanding their powers, might it be possible to decrease the number who enter criminal justice's gates? This question opens debate on the subject of the book's final section: the prospects for more inclusive accusative grammars that do not, as a reflex, turn to exclusionary visions of crime and vengeful, segregated, corrective or risk-orientated punishment. Highlighting how expansive criminal justice systems are populated by accusatorial powers, and how it might be possible to recalibrate the lore that feeds them, this ground-breaking analysis will be of considerable interest to scholars working in socio-legal research studies, critical criminology, social theory, postcolonial studies and critical legal theory.

This book provides a systematic and interdisciplinary examination of law and legal institutions in Malaysia. It examines legal issues from historical, social, and political perspectives, and discusses the role of law in relation to Malaysian multiculturalism, religion, politics, and society. It shows how the Malaysian legal system is at the heart of debates about how to deal with the country's problems, which include ethnic and religious divisions, uneven and unsustainable development, and political authoritarianism; and it argues that the Malaysian legal system has much to teach other plural polities, nations within the common law tradition, and federal states.

Since her appointment as the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has had a major, but largely unrecognized, influence on the collective jurisprudence of the Burger and Rehnquist Courts. In this comprehensive and systematic analysis of O'Connor's judicial contributions, Nancy Maveety describes how O'Connor has used accommodationist decision-making strategies to make substantive contributions to the development of both constitutional law and the Court's norms of collegiality. Skeptical of interpretations that seek to impose feminist conventions on O'Connor's judicial behavior, this account combines biographical data with an analytical discussion of O'Connor's crucial decisions. This is important reading for anyone interested in the Supreme Court and contemporary jurisprudence.

A sequel to Bauer and Dawuni's pioneering study on gender and the judiciary in Africa (Routledge, 2016), International Courts and the African Woman Judge examines questions on gender diversity, representative benches, and international courts by focusing on women judges from the continent of Africa. Drawing from postcolonial feminism, feminist institutionalism, feminist legal theory, and legal narratives, this book provides fresh and detailed narratives of seven women judges that challenge existing discourse on gender diversity in international courts. It answers important questions about how the politics of judicial appointments, gender, geographic location, class, and professional capital combine to shape the lives of women judges who sit on international courts and argues the need to disaggregate gender diversity with a view to understanding intra-group differences. International Courts and the African Woman Judge will be of interest to a variety of audiences including governments, policy makers, civil society organizations, students of gender studies, and feminist activists interested in all questions of gender and judging.

Focusing on the relationship between the micro level of perpetrator motivation and the macro level normative discourse, this book offers an in-depth explanation for the perpetration of genocide. It is the first comparative criminological treatment of genocide drawn from original field research, based substantially on the author's interviews with perpetrators and victims of genocide and mass atrocities, combined with wide-ranging secondary and archival sources. Topics covered include: perpetration in organizations, genocidal propaganda, the characteristics of perpetrators, decision-making in genocide, genocidal mobilization, coping with killing, perpetrator memory and trauma, moral rationalization, and transitional justice. An interdisciplinary and comparative analysis, this book utilizes scientific methods with the objective of gaining some degree of insight into the causes of genocide and genocide perpetration. It is argued that genocide is more than a mere intellectual abstraction - it is a crime with real consequences and real victims. Abstraction and objectivity may be intellectual ideals but they are not ideally humane; genocide is ultimately about the destruction of humanity. Thus, this book avoids presenting an overly abstract image of genocide, but rather grounds its analysis in interviews with victims and perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Iraq. This book will be highly useful to students and scholars with an interest in genocide and the causes of mass violence. It will also be of interest to policy-makers engaged with the issues of genocide and conflict prevention.

This ground-breaking collection dares to take the next step in the advancement of an autonomous, inter-disciplinary restorative justice field of study. It brings together criminology, social psychology, legal theory, neuroscience, affect-script psychology, sociology, forensic mental health, political sciences, psychology and positive psychology to articulate for the first time a psychological concept of restorative justice. To this end, the book studies the power structures of the restorative justice movement, the very psychology, motivations and emotions of the practitioners who implement it as well as the drivers of its theoreticians and researchers. Furthermore, it examines the strengths and weakness of our own societies and the communities that are called to participate as parties in restorative justice. Their own biases, hunger for power and control, fears and hopes are investigated. The psychology and dynamics between those it aims to reach as well as those who are funding it, including policy makers and politicians, are looked into. All these questions lead to creating an understanding of the psychology of restorative justice. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers, policymakers, practitioners and campaigners.

Over the last fifteen years, the analytical field of punishment and society has witnessed an increase of research developing the connection between economic processes and the evolution of penality from different standpoints, focusing particularly on the increase of rates of incarceration in relation to the transformations of neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together leading researchers from diverse geographical contexts, this book reframes the theoretical field of the political economy of punishment, analysing penality within the current economic situation and connecting contemporary penal changes with political and cultural processes. It challenges the traditional and common sense understanding of imprisonment as 'exclusion' and posits a more promising concept of imprisonment as a 'differential' or 'subordinate' form of 'inclusion'. This groundbreaking book will be a key text for scholars who are working in the field of punishment and society as well as reaching a broader audience within law, sociology, economics, criminology and criminal justice studies.

In 2007, the Corston Report recommended a far-reaching, radical, 'women-centred' approach to women's imprisonment in England and Wales. It suggested a 'fundamental re-thinking' about how services to support women in conflict with the law are delivered in custody and in the community, recommending the development and implementation of a decarceration strategy. This argued for appropriate treatment programmes in the community, reserving prison for only those women who commit serious and violent offences. Ten years on, what progress has been made? What is the relationship between Corston's vision and a more radical abolitionist agenda? Drawing on a range of international scholarship, this book contributes to the critical discourse on the penal system, human rights, and social injustice, revealing the consequences of imprisonment on the lives of women and their families. A decade on from Corston's publication, it critically reviews her report, revealing the slow progress in meeting the reforms it proposed. Identifying the significant barriers to change, it questions the failure to reverse the unrelenting growth of the women's prison population or to transform state responses to women's offending. Reflecting the global expansion of women's imprisonment, particularly marked in advanced democratic societies, the chapters include comparative contributions from jurisdictions where Corston's recommendations have relevance. It concludes with a critical appraisal of reformism and the case for penal abolition. Essential for applied and theory courses on prisons, punishment, and penology; social justice and the criminology of human rights; gender and crime; and feminist criminology.