Reflections on Crime and Culpability
Problems and Puzzles

Through one coherent retributivist vision of the criminal law, this book explores under examined problems within criminal law theory.

Larry Alexander (Author), Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (Author)

9781316612613, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 October 2018

234 pages
22.7 x 15.1 x 1.3 cm, 0.33 kg

'Alexander and Ferzan are deft deployers of analytic rigor to solve the puzzles and paradoxes that criminal law produces. Many will disagree with their creative and often elegant solutions, but all readers will be challenged and learn from this book. It is an indispensable work of criminal law theory.' Stephen J. Morse, University of Pennsylvania Law School

In 2009, Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan published Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law. The book set out a theory that those who deserve punishment should receive punishment commensurate with, but no greater than, that which they deserve. Reflections on Crime and Culpability: Problems and Puzzles expands on their innovative ideas on the application of punishment in criminal law. Theorists working in criminal law theory presuppose or ignore puzzles that lurk beneath the surface. Now those who wish to examine these topics will have one monograph that combines the disparate puzzles in criminal law through a unified approach to culpability. Along with some suggestions as to how they might resolve the puzzles, Alexander and Ferzan lay out the arguments and analysis so future scholars can engage with questions about our understanding of culpability that very few have addressed.

Acknowledgements
1. Crime and culpability: recounting the basic picture
Part I. Problems and Puzzles of Risking: 2. Risking other people's riskings
3. Risks and 'other law' beliefs
4. Omissions and culpable riskings: problems, problems
5. Is there a case for proxy crimes? Part II. Problems and Puzzles of Culpability: 6. Moral ignorance
7. The violator of deontological constraints
8. Mass murders, recidivists, and volume discounts
Part III. Problems and Puzzles of Punishment: 9. The problem of psychological disconnection between the culpable actor and the person to be punished
10. Distributing retributive desert
Part IV. Conclusion: 11. Conclusion
Index.

Subject Areas: Criminal law & procedure [LNF], Criminology: legal aspects [LAR], Jurisprudence & general issues [LA], Law [L]