Nicola Lacey
Biographic Data
| ID | 295052 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicola Lacey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicola |
| FAMILY NAME | Lacey |
| SIGNATURE | LACEY N |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 161 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Comments by Nicola Lacey
Institutionalising Interpersonal Ideas in Law
How can we best deploy law so as to have positive effects in the social world? This question is at the heart of legal scholarship. In this lecture, I revisit a familiar and widely researched aspect of contemporary legal reality – expanding and increasingly complex regulatory frameworks in criminal law and abutting areas of governance – to ask how we might best pursue the project of constraining, rationalising or even reversing these developments …
Tracing the Relationship between Inequality, Crime and Punishment: Space, Time and Politics
The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty’s focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their impact on social, political and economic life, now present themselves among the most urgent issues facing scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Key among these is the relationship between inequality, crime and punishment. The proposition…
Getting Proportionality in Perspective: Philosophy, History, and Institutions
Conceptual debates about proportionality and its moral and political force need to be placed in historical and institutional context. Conceptual, moral, political, and practical questions about proportionality are inextricably linked. This insight should lead us away from the dominant conception of proportionality as a moral precept and toward a political conception of proportionality that is inevitably shaped by prevailing conceptions of what pr…
William Twining and the Law in Context series: A personal reflection
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Populism and the Rule of Law
The resurgence of populism in Europe and North America is widely thought to have placed the rule of law under pressure. But how many of the relevant developments are indeed associated with populism? And is any such association a contingent or analytic matter: Does populism inevitably threaten the rule of law, or do other conditions intervene to shape its impact? After setting out how I understand the rule of law and populism, I examine the ways i…
A Dual‐Process Approach to Criminal Law: Victims and the Clinical Model of Responsibility without Blame
The dominant orientation in both mainstream and alternative forms of criminal justice theory and practice employs a single process approach: one that aims to do justice to victims primarily through conviction and punishment of the offender.In other words, justice for victims crucially involves offenders getting their 'just deserts'.In contrast, this paper argues for a dual process approach: one that separates conceptually and, in so far as possib…
Comparing Serious Violent Crime in the United States and England and Wales
This chapter shows how reasonably valid comparative data for violent crime in the United States and England and Wales can be derived. Comparative analysis of violent crime is hampered by a lack of reliable statistics, even between relatively similar countries, with doubts about existing studies suggesting that further comparative data are needed. Violent crime presents particular problems of variation in offense definition and recording practices…
American Exceptionalism in Crime, Punishment, and Disadvantage
This chapter sets a particular thesis focused on the institutional structure of the American political system within the context of a broader literature in the comparative political economy of crime and punishment. It then considers three possible objections to this analysis. The first argues that increasing American exceptionalism in the postwar period is to be explained primarily in terms of a distinctive history and politics of race. The next …
Companions on a Serendipitous Journey
This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with major books that have influenced the authors. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André‐Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, Roger Brownsword, and Roger Cotterrell
Responsibility without Consciousness
This paper addresses the relationship between responsibility and consciousness, in the light of both H.L.A. Hart's and subsequent philosophical analysis. First, is consciousness necessary to responsibility-attribution? If so, how demanding a requirement is this? And does it make sense to pose these questions in the abstract? Second, when we move from the realm of moral argumentation to that of law, are there additional factors -institutional, fun…
In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions
Building on Lacey's previous analysis in Women, Crime and Character (2008), this book brings together philosophical, historical, and socio-legal methods in legal scholarship. Distinguishing between ideas of responsibility as founded in character, psychological capacity, the causation of harmful outcomes or the presentation of risk, the book draws links between these ideas of responsibility; the institutions through which they are produced, interp…
The Metaphor of Proportionality
The idea of proportionality has figured prominently in moral, legal, and political theory. It has been central to the articulation of an ideal of limited punishment in modern legal orders, and to judicial and academic efforts to lay down standards for legitimate state conduct in a range of areas. Setting out from a broad view of the role of metaphor, I map histories of proportionality in different spheres (law, politics, culture), spaces (nation …
Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus (1907–92)
Crime, punishment and segregation in the United States: The paradox of local democracy
Patterns of crime and punishment in the USA greatly magnify corresponding developments in other liberal market economies – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK – faced with similar broad macro-technological transformations, namely the collapse of Fordism in the 1970s and 1980s and the development of knowledge economies in the 1990s and 2000s. In this article, we set out the case for seeing these differences as largely the product of dynamics…
The Chimera of Proportionality: Institutionalising Limits on Punishment in Contemporary Social and Political Systems
The concept of proportionality has been central to the retributive revival in penal theory, and underlies desert theory's normative and practical commitment to limiting punishment. Theories of punishment combining desert‐based and consequentialist considerations also appeal to proportionality as a limiting condition. In this paper we argue that these claims are founded on an exaggerated idea of what proportionality can offer, and in particular fa…
Punishment, (Neo)Liberalism and Social Democracy
The lecture was delivered on 15 February 2012.
The rule of law and the political economy of criminalisation: An agenda for research
This article argues for an institutional approach to criminalisation scholarship, drawing on historical and comparative methodologies, and on the resources of several disciplines including law, sociology and political science. It goes on to sketch the sort of research agenda which is implied by that approach, with a view to laying the intellectual building blocks for a broad political economy of criminalisation within modern societies committed t…
State Punishment
Differentiating among penal states
This review article assesses Loïc Wacquant's contribution to debates on penality, focusing on his most recent book, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity ( Wacquant 2009 ), while setting its argument in the context of his earlier Prisons of Poverty (1999). In particular, it draws on both historical and comparative methods to question whether Wacquant's conception of ‘the penal state’ is adequately differentiated for t…
American imprisonment in comparative perspective
Historicising Criminalisation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues
This paper charts a renaissance in scholarly analysis of criminalisation, and suggests that we do not have the conceptual tools or empirical knowledge to make the claims about ‘overcriminalisation’ which motivate much of this scholarship. My argument gives further shape to projects under the umbrella of criminalisation, setting out some of the conceptual issues to be resolved before we can work towards an adequate interpretive, and normative, vis…
The Prisoners' Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies
Over the last two decades, and in the wake of increases in recorded crime and other social changes, British criminal justice policy has become increasingly politicised as an index of governments' competence. New and worrying developments, such as the inexorable rise of the US prison population and the rising force of penal severity, seem unstoppable in the face of popular anxiety about crime. But is this inevitable? Nicola Lacey argues that harsh…
The prisoners' dilemma political economy and punishment in contemporary democracies
"Over the last two decades, in the wake of increases in recorded crime and a cluster of other social changes, British criminal justice policy has become increasingly politicised: both the scale and intensity of punishment and the significance of criminal justice policy as an index of governments' competence have developed in new and worrying ways. Across the Atlantic, we witness the inexorable rise of the US prison population, amid a ratcheting-u…
Responsibility and Modernity in Criminal Law
Crime, punishment and segregation in the United States: The paradox of local democracy
Patterns of crime and punishment in the USA greatly magnify corresponding developments in other liberal market economies – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK – faced with similar broad macro-technological transformations, namely the collapse of Fordism in the 1970s and 1980s and the development of knowledge economies in the 1990s and 2000s. In this article, we set out the case for seeing these differences as largely the product of dynamics…
Feminist Legal Theory
Journal Article Feminist Legal Theory Get access NICOLA LACEY NICOLA LACEY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 9, Issue 3, Autumn 1989, Pages 383–394, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/9.3.383 Published: 01 October 1989
Populism and the Rule of Law
The resurgence of populism in Europe and North America is widely thought to have placed the rule of law under pressure. But how many of the relevant developments are indeed associated with populism? And is any such association a contingent or analytic matter: Does populism inevitably threaten the rule of law, or do other conditions intervene to shape its impact? After setting out how I understand the rule of law and populism, I examine the ways i…
Discourses of Community in Criminal Justice
The processes of rapid social and economic change which characterize most contemporary Western societies have promoted ever greater mobility, wrested social relations from localized contexts, weakened family and communal ties and, in so doing, eroded 'traditional' forms of social cohesion. Social order is increasingly thought of as something which cannot merely be protected and maintained but which must, rather, be actively constructed and manage…
Responsibility and Modernity in Criminal Law
Theory into Practice? Pornography and the Public/Private Dichotomy
The feminist total critique of the liberal opposition of private and public still awaits its philosopher'.1 So concluded Carole Pateman in an important article written a decade ago. During the intervening years, there has been an explosion of feminist literature reflecting upon issues raised by public/private dichotomies in social and political thought, much of it concerned with legal analysis or questions of legal policy and reform. Yet, notwith…
American imprisonment in comparative perspective
The Chimera of Proportionality: Institutionalising Limits on Punishment in Contemporary Social and Political Systems
The concept of proportionality has been central to the retributive revival in penal theory, and underlies desert theory's normative and practical commitment to limiting punishment. Theories of punishment combining desert‐based and consequentialist considerations also appeal to proportionality as a limiting condition. In this paper we argue that these claims are founded on an exaggerated idea of what proportionality can offer, and in particular fa…
Government as Manager, Citizen as Consumer: The Case of the Criminal Justice Act 1991
Normative Reconstruction in Socio-Legal Theory
The rule of law and the political economy of criminalisation: An agenda for research
This article argues for an institutional approach to criminalisation scholarship, drawing on historical and comparative methodologies, and on the resources of several disciplines including law, sociology and political science. It goes on to sketch the sort of research agenda which is implied by that approach, with a view to laying the intellectual building blocks for a broad political economy of criminalisation within modern societies committed t…
Historicising Criminalisation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues
This paper charts a renaissance in scholarly analysis of criminalisation, and suggests that we do not have the conceptual tools or empirical knowledge to make the claims about ‘overcriminalisation’ which motivate much of this scholarship. My argument gives further shape to projects under the umbrella of criminalisation, setting out some of the conceptual issues to be resolved before we can work towards an adequate interpretive, and normative, vis…
In Search of the Responsible Subject: History, Philosophy and Social Sciences in Criminal Law Theory
This paper examines the way in which English criminal law’s conception of responsibility has changed since the eighteenth century, and explores the relationship between changes in legal framework, changes in processes of criminalisation and punishment, and broader social, political and economic changes. It argues that the development of ideas of individual responsibility for crime are responses to problems of co‐ordination and legitimation faced …
A Dual‐Process Approach to Criminal Law: Victims and the Clinical Model of Responsibility without Blame
The dominant orientation in both mainstream and alternative forms of criminal justice theory and practice employs a single process approach: one that aims to do justice to victims primarily through conviction and punishment of the offender.In other words, justice for victims crucially involves offenders getting their 'just deserts'.In contrast, this paper argues for a dual process approach: one that separates conceptually and, in so far as possib…
The Metaphor of Proportionality
The idea of proportionality has figured prominently in moral, legal, and political theory. It has been central to the articulation of an ideal of limited punishment in modern legal orders, and to judicial and academic efforts to lay down standards for legitimate state conduct in a range of areas. Setting out from a broad view of the role of metaphor, I map histories of proportionality in different spheres (law, politics, culture), spaces (nation …
Legislation against Sex Discrimination: Questions from a Feminist Perspective
Since the Equal Pay Act was enacted in 1970, Britain has gradually formulated a legislative scheme explicitly aimed at the elimination of certain forms of discrimination.1 The Sex Discrimination Acts 1975 and 1986 and the Race Relations Act 1986 have resulted. Accession to the European Community has introduced the European standard of equal treatment, prompting developments such as the Equal Pay (Amendment) Regulations 1983, which introduced the …
Community in German Criminal Justice: A Significant Absence
The article is prompted by an apparent paradox. In Germany, working relations between state criminal justice agencies and non-state institutions within a locality are often extremely close, relying upon networks of communication and a degree of mutual reliance, which in Britain would undoubtedly invoke reference to the idea of 'community'. In Germany, however, criminal justice professionals rarely describe this in terms of community. Though the e…
Institutionalising Interpersonal Ideas in Law
How can we best deploy law so as to have positive effects in the social world? This question is at the heart of legal scholarship. In this lecture, I revisit a familiar and widely researched aspect of contemporary legal reality – expanding and increasingly complex regulatory frameworks in criminal law and abutting areas of governance – to ask how we might best pursue the project of constraining, rationalising or even reversing these developments …
Getting Proportionality in Perspective: Philosophy, History, and Institutions
Conceptual debates about proportionality and its moral and political force need to be placed in historical and institutional context. Conceptual, moral, political, and practical questions about proportionality are inextricably linked. This insight should lead us away from the dominant conception of proportionality as a moral precept and toward a political conception of proportionality that is inevitably shaped by prevailing conceptions of what pr…
Unspeakable subjects, impossible rights: Sexuality, integrity and criminal law
(1997). Unspeakable subjects, impossible rights: Sexuality, integrity and criminal law. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 143-157
Politics and the Public in Rawls' Political Liberalism
This paper is a critical discussion of a number of related themes in John Rawls' Political Liberalism. First, it considers whether Rawls' recent statement of his position proceeds from an adequate methodology for political theory. In particular, it questions whether Rawls has succeeded in accommodating both universalist, analytic and particularist, interpretive aspects of the political theoretical enterprise. Second, it engages in critical analys…
Communitarianism
This article presents ‘Communitarianism’ in political theory as a ‘Blind Alley’. This is on the grounds that it is difficult to find a political theorist who is willing to be called a communitarian, because the literature lacks any well delineated concept of community, and because a number of awkward theoretical questions, notably about power, arise which are not clearly addressed within the literature. Furthermore, communitarianism has been a bl…
A Clear Concept of Intention: Elusive or Illusory
Capital Punishment: Objections from Principle and Practice
THE ISSUE OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT HAS PERHAPS BEEN MORE widely and publicly debated in this country than in any other. It has been a live political issue for well over a century, and the range of views represented by participants is as broad today as at any time in the past. Given the vast amount of literature – philosophical, legal, political and statistical – devoted to the subject, it is difficult to contribute to the debate in some more substan…
Punishment and Welfare
Legislation against Sex Discrimination: Questions from a Feminist Perspective
Since the Equal Pay Act was enacted in 1970, Britain has gradually formulated a legislative scheme explicitly aimed at the elimination of certain forms of discrimination.1 The Sex Discrimination Acts 1975 and 1986 and the Race Relations Act 1986 have resulted. Accession to the European Community has introduced the European standard of equal treatment, prompting developments such as the Equal Pay (Amendment) Regulations 1983, which introduced the …
Are Rights Best Left Unwritten
Feminist Legal Theory
Journal Article Feminist Legal Theory Get access NICOLA LACEY NICOLA LACEY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 9, Issue 3, Autumn 1989, Pages 383–394, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/9.3.383 Published: 01 October 1989
Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice. By John Braithwaite and Philip Pettit. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. viii + 229. Price £27.50.) Nicola Lacey Nicola Lacey New College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 164, July 1991, Pages 374–376, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220050 Published: 01 July 19…
Theories of Justice and the Welfare State
In the proceedings of the IVR World Congress, 1991, ARSP
Theory into Practice? Pornography and the Public/Private Dichotomy
The feminist total critique of the liberal opposition of private and public still awaits its philosopher'.1 So concluded Carole Pateman in an important article written a decade ago. During the intervening years, there has been an explosion of feminist literature reflecting upon issues raised by public/private dichotomies in social and political thought, much of it concerned with legal analysis or questions of legal policy and reform. Yet, notwith…
A Clear Concept of Intention: Elusive or Illusory
Mapping modernities
Government as Manager, Citizen as Consumer: The Case of the Criminal Justice Act 1991
Communitarianism
This article presents ‘Communitarianism’ in political theory as a ‘Blind Alley’. This is on the grounds that it is difficult to find a political theorist who is willing to be called a communitarian, because the literature lacks any well delineated concept of community, and because a number of awkward theoretical questions, notably about power, arise which are not clearly addressed within the literature. Furthermore, communitarianism has been a bl…
Discourses of Community in Criminal Justice
The processes of rapid social and economic change which characterize most contemporary Western societies have promoted ever greater mobility, wrested social relations from localized contexts, weakened family and communal ties and, in so doing, eroded 'traditional' forms of social cohesion. Social order is increasingly thought of as something which cannot merely be protected and maintained but which must, rather, be actively constructed and manage…
In(de)terminable Intentions
Politics and the Public in Rawls' Political Liberalism
This paper is a critical discussion of a number of related themes in John Rawls' Political Liberalism. First, it considers whether Rawls' recent statement of his position proceeds from an adequate methodology for political theory. In particular, it questions whether Rawls has succeeded in accommodating both universalist, analytic and particularist, interpretive aspects of the political theoretical enterprise. Second, it engages in critical analys…
Normative Reconstruction in Socio-Legal Theory
Reply to Lowe
The concept ‘community’ is underspecified in the political theory literature – it must have a more specific reference than just some collectivity or some network of social relations. But attempts to specify what is specific about the relation of community are unsatisfactory. And references to ‘actual physical’ communities overlook the symbolic and imagined aspects of community, which furthermore destabilise putative communities as much as they st…
Unspeakable subjects, impossible rights: Sexuality, integrity and criminal law
(1997). Unspeakable subjects, impossible rights: Sexuality, integrity and criminal law. Women: A Cultural Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 143-157
Community in German Criminal Justice: A Significant Absence
The article is prompted by an apparent paradox. In Germany, working relations between state criminal justice agencies and non-state institutions within a locality are often extremely close, relying upon networks of communication and a degree of mutual reliance, which in Britain would undoubtedly invoke reference to the idea of 'community'. In Germany, however, criminal justice professionals rarely describe this in terms of community. Though the e…
Unspeakable subjects: Feminist Essays in Legal and Social Theory
Nicola Lacey's book presents a feminist critique of law based on an analysis of the ways in which the very structure or method of modern law is gendered. All of the essays in the book therefore engage at some level with the question of whether there are things of a general nature to be said about what might be called the sex or gender of law. Ranging across fields including criminal law,public law and anti-discrimination law, the essays examine t…
Responsibility and Modernity in Criminal Law
In Search of the Responsible Subject: History, Philosophy and Social Sciences in Criminal Law Theory
This paper examines the way in which English criminal law’s conception of responsibility has changed since the eighteenth century, and explores the relationship between changes in legal framework, changes in processes of criminalisation and punishment, and broader social, political and economic changes. It argues that the development of ideas of individual responsibility for crime are responses to problems of co‐ordination and legitimation faced …
The Prisoners' Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies
Over the last two decades, and in the wake of increases in recorded crime and other social changes, British criminal justice policy has become increasingly politicised as an index of governments' competence. New and worrying developments, such as the inexorable rise of the US prison population and the rising force of penal severity, seem unstoppable in the face of popular anxiety about crime. But is this inevitable? Nicola Lacey argues that harsh…
The prisoners' dilemma political economy and punishment in contemporary democracies
"Over the last two decades, in the wake of increases in recorded crime and a cluster of other social changes, British criminal justice policy has become increasingly politicised: both the scale and intensity of punishment and the significance of criminal justice policy as an index of governments' competence have developed in new and worrying ways. Across the Atlantic, we witness the inexorable rise of the US prison population, amid a ratcheting-u…
Historicising Criminalisation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues
This paper charts a renaissance in scholarly analysis of criminalisation, and suggests that we do not have the conceptual tools or empirical knowledge to make the claims about ‘overcriminalisation’ which motivate much of this scholarship. My argument gives further shape to projects under the umbrella of criminalisation, setting out some of the conceptual issues to be resolved before we can work towards an adequate interpretive, and normative, vis…
Political science (40 works) · Sociology (40 works) · Law (38 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (23 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (14 works) · Criminology (14 works) · Law and economics (14 works) · Computer Science (11 works)