Crime, reason, and history

About this book

Crime, Reason and History provides an exciting and challenging new approach to the study of the criminal law. It offers a critical introduction to the law's general principles emphasising, in contrast to orthodox criminal law texts, the tensions and contradictions that lie at their heart. Norrie argues that the apparently abstract and ahistorical components of the criminal law were developed from the rationalist and individualist ideologies of the Enlightenment. The concepts of individual justice and citizenship which inform the criminal law coexist in tension with the nature of crime and its control as a social and political concern. Norrie begins by outlining the themes of rationality and justice which govern the organisation of the orthodox criminal law text. He then places these in the context of the reform of the criminal law begun in the early nineteenth century. Noting the primary conflicts within the ideologies of reform, he takes the reader through the established debates and rules of criminal doctrine that constitute the bulk of the law's 'general' partmotive and intention; recklessness; strict and corporate liability; act and omission; causation; necessity and duress; insanity and diminished responsibility; and sentencing. He shows how these conflicts are replicated within doctrine, and that a historical and political logic underlies the law's prevalent illogicalities and gives the criminal law its particular 'shape'. Norrie presents a sceptical critique of the dominant liberal and positivist tradition in criminal law scholarship, and a historical and social analysis of both its practical necessity and intellectual impossibility. He shows how the ideology of individual legal justice was imposed as a means of silencing and excluding alternative political voices, while he recognises its importance for the survival of the liberal polity.