In a world in which ‘everyday sexism’ remains rife, progress on gender discrimination will require quotas

The UK continues to exhibit large disparities in power and representation between men and women. Gender inequality exists within the context of overlapping areas of social, political, professional and economic life. Only a systemic approach offers any hope of tackling the issue. Nicola Lacey of the LSE’s Commission on Gender, Inequality and Power shares findings from the final report, and recommends that quotas as well as other specific policies should be instituted in order that we see meaningful process

Book review: making the modern criminal law: criminalization and civil order

Lindsay Farmer, Making the Modern Criminal Law: Criminalization and Civil Order Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016, 352 pp., hb £65.0

Rechtswissenschaft, Geschichte und die institutionelle Natur des Rechts

In this paper, I argue that history deserves a more central place in jurisprudential thinking. The argument rests on an understanding of law as having a fundamental institutional dimension, as well as being a product of social power and interests. Since law realises itself in terms of intersecting institutional arrangements and since these change over time, institutional history is central to the very idea of law which jurisprudence aspires to illuminate. The argument is pursued through a case study in special jurisprudence: an analysis of the trajectory of ideas of criminal responsibility in English law since the 18th century. While a broad family resemblance among ideas of responsibility in different eras can be identified, the variations on those ideas, and their relative importance and impact, depend fundamentally on historically contingent constellations of ideas, institutions and interests

Women, crime and character in twentieth century law and literature: in search of the modern Moll Flanders

The twentieth century saw decisive changes in women’s legal, social, economic and political position. But how far have these changes been reflected in women’s position as subjects of criminalisation in the courts, in legal thought or in literary fiction? This paper takes up the story of the gradual marginalisation of criminal women in both legal and literary history, asking whether a criminal heroine such as Moll Flanders (1722) is thinkable again, and what this can tell us about conceptions of women as subjects of criminal law. How far do the conceptions of, and dilemmas about, female subjectivity, agency, capacity and character which emerge successively in 20th Century literary culture reflect and illuminate the relevant patterns and debates in criminal law and philosophy

In dialogue with criminal responsibility

In this response, Nicola Lacey enters into dialogue with the symposium contributors, identifying and commenting on some of the key themes which they have raised about the treatment of criminal responsibility in her book. These include the problematization of progress narratives; criminal law’s capacity to counter—and to reinforce—inequality; the scope for further development of gender and comparative analysis; the appropriate degree of contextualization; and the relationship between historical interpretation and philosophical analysis in the methodology of criminal law theory

Socializing the subject of criminal law? Criminal responsibility and the purposes of criminalization

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Childcare is a central issue in women’s participation and advancement in business

Nicola Lacey talks about the LSE Commission on Gender’s recommendations to fix the proble

Book review: preventive justice

Preventive Justice. By Andrew Ashworth and Lucia Zedner (Oxford University Press, 2014, 306pp. 50.00) In a world in which criminal law and criminal justice appear to be driven to an ever greater extent by concerns with security, the expedient of preventive justice has assumed a new and, to many, worrying salience in the policy repertoire of the United Kingdom and a number of other western democracies. Preventive criminalization is, of course, not a new phenomenon: inchoate offences; offences of possession and the binding over power attendant on an anticipated breach of the peace are long-standing examples of the preventive impulse in English criminal law. But this preventive turn appears to have taken on a new intensity in the last two decades. Among the many scholars who have turned their attention to this phenomenon, Andrew Ashworth and Lucia Zedner are probably the most influential. In particular, their analysis of no fewer than nine families of preventive measures, many of them combining civil and criminal modes of enforcement in what have been widely regarded as troubling ways, has quite rightly attracted widespread attention.1 Their monograph has accordingly been awaited eagerly; and it does not disappoint. Conceptually elegant, beautifully written, it not only maps out the contours of this emerging field of criminalization but also sets the recent developments within a much-needed historical context. Setting out from a careful conceptualization of preventive justice and its relationship to the ‘preventive state’, the book goes on to trace its historical evolution, before presenting a meticulous account and analysis of a range of preventive measures in contemporary criminal law and criminal justice (particularly in the field of counterterrorism), in public health law and in immigration law. It also sets out some of the issues, both empirical and normative, which are raised by the practices of risk assessment, which typically go hand in hand with the implementation of