In the mid-1960s, the so-called ‘Hart-Devlin debate’ was generally regarded by criminal law theorists as having resulted in an unambiguous victory for Hart. Yet in a special issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy in 2013, marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of H.L.A. Hart’s Law,...

One of the most extraordinary social science phenomena of the postwar period has been the rise in violent crime in large American cities from the 1970s to the mid 1990s and the consequent rise in incarceration; and then its subsequent dramatic decline in most of those cities and the...

In terms of key criminal justice indices such as the rate of the most serious violent crime and the imprisonment rate, the United States not only performs worse than other advanced democracies, but does so to a startling degree. Moreover these differences have become more extreme over the last...

This paper argues that contemporary patterns of punishment can only be fully understood through comparative analysis, and makes in particular a case for a political – economic approach based on the analysis of comparative institutional advantage of differently structured systems. This...