Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in American Legal Thought

This book deals with the most fundamental problem in criminal law, the way in which free will and determinism relate to criminal responsibility.

Thomas Andrew Green (Author)

9781107566880, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 October 2015

520 pages
23.4 x 15.5 x 3 cm, 0.81 kg

'Green chronicles legal academic ideas in the United States, from the Progressive Era critiques of free-will-based (and generally retributive) theories of criminal responsibility, to the mid-century acceptance of the idea of free will as necessary, to a criminal law conceived of in practical moral-legal terms that need not accord with scientific fact, to the late-in-century insistence on the compatibility of scientific determinism with moral and legal responsibility and with a modern version of the retributivism that the Progressives had attacked.' Law and Social Enquiry

As the first full-length study of twentieth-century American legal academics wrestling with the problem of free will versus determinism in the context of criminal responsibility, this book deals with one of the most fundamental problems in criminal law. Thomas Andrew Green chronicles legal academic ideas from the Progressive Era critiques of free will-based (and generally retributive) theories of criminal responsibility to the midcentury acceptance of the idea of free will as necessary to a criminal law conceived of in practical moral-legal terms that need not accord with scientific fact to the late-in-century insistence on the compatibility of scientific determinism with moral and legal responsibility and with a modern version of the retributivism that the Progressives had attacked. Foregrounding scholars' language and ideas, Green invites readers to participate in reconstructing an aspect of the past that is central to attempts to work out bases for moral judgment, legal blame, and criminal punishment.

Introduction
Part I. Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in the Age of Pound: 1. The fin de siècle: Speranza
2. The Progressive Era: Pound
3. Pound eclipsed?: the conversation of the mid to late 1920s
Part II. Conventional Morality and the Rule of Law: Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in the Forgotten Years, 1930–60: 4. Scientific positivism, utilitarianism, and the wages of conventional morality, 1930–7
5. Entr'acte: intimations of freedom, 1937–53
6. Durham v. US, the moral context of the law, and reinterpretations of the Progressive inheritance, 1954–8
Part III. Freedom, Criminal Responsibility, and Retributivism in Late Twentieth-Century Legal Thought: 7. The foundations of neo-retributivism, 1957–76
8. Rethinking the freedom question, 1978–94
9. Competing perspectives at the close of the twentieth century
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]