Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal methodology, this volume investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law.

• 1: In Search of Criminal Responsibility


• 2: Ideas


• 3: Interests


• 4: Institutions


• 5: Explaining the Shifting Alignment of Ideas of Responsibility in the Vortex of Interests and Institutions: Towards a Political Economy of Responsibility in English Criminal Law


• 6: Implications for Legal Theory and Legal Scholarship

Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics. From 2010 until September 2013 she was Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford. She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School and at New York University Law School. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College Oxford and of University College Oxford, an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is an elected member of the Council of Liberty, and served as a member of the British Academy's Policy Group on Prisons, which reported in 2014. In 2011, she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern, for scholarship on the rule of law in modern societies.