‘The Very Foundations of Any System of Criminal Justice’: Criminal Responsibility in the Australian Model Criminal Code

Responsibility problems for criminal justice

It has been argued that empirical science undermines the claim that people can deserve punishment, and that the criminal justice system therefore ought to be radically reformed. Such arguments lose their force if moral responsibility and desert do not depend on what caused the action, but on the agent’s choice. We solve one problem for the justification of the criminal justice system, but creat...

Victorian Criminal Justice System

The criminal trial constitutes a drama performed by its leading actors (legal professionals) plus supporting actors (including spectators). How conscious and strategic are their performances? This article argues that conscious legal performativity is part of a sustained tradition of 'infotainment' with lasting implications for today's real-life courtroom dramas. The adoption of stereotypical co...

Criminal Responsibility

are not always evident to the man in the street and are particularly easy to neglect when involved in the highly sensational atmosphere of a murder trial; this is of course particularly so if the details are horrific or sexual or both and if a plea of insanity is raised in defence. It may therefore be helpful to re-state the points at issue. The first point is that lawyers and doctors talk in d...

The insanity of a criminal justice system.

Decisions of the Criminal Justice System

Over the past 20 years, the United States has experienced a massive increase in imprisonment. The number of people incarcerated and the clustering of that incarceration in the inner-city black population raise the prospect that incarceration may be undermining less coercive institutions of social control such as families or communities. The long-term result of this incarceration policy, then, w...