In Search of Criminal Responsibility
Ideas, Interests, and Institutions
Nicola Lacey
What makes someone responsible for a crime and
therefore liable to punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will
quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus
reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will
only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct
while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at
the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character
of the offender, meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or
the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a
relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the
practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in
18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English
criminal responsibility-attribution.
Building upon the analysis
of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character,
Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English
law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined
philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how
the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character
and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century
diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the
idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the
core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility
into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the
discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in
the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored
through an examination of 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
