'Legality Bound', a comment on Hans Lindahl, Fault lines of globalization:
Legal order and the politics of a-legality, OUP 2013, forthcoming in
Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought, 2016
(A version of this article is available here:
www.hanslindahl.org/publications/)
'Posthumous “punishment”’: What can be done about criminal wrongs after the
wrongdoer’s death' Criminal Law & Philosophy (2015) (online first)
The commission of criminal wrongs is occasionally revealed after the (suspected) wrongdoer’s death. In such cases, there seems to be a widely-shared intuition, which also frequently motivates many people’s actions, that the dead should still be blamed and that some response, not only stemming from civil society but also the state, to the criminal wrong is necessary. This article explores the possibility of posthumous blame and punishment by the state. After highlighting the deficiencies of the pure versions of retributivism and general deterrence theory, but also the potential in the latter, it argues for a political theory of the criminal law (mainly from a normative perspective, although the modest claim is made in passing that current institutional arrangements are best understood in this light), which views institutions of punishment as the business not only of defendants and victims but also the political community as a whole. Within this normative scheme posthumous responses to wrongs are possible and in some cases necessary for the maintenance of the stability of the political community. Accountability-holding processes may also be possible and necessary for the protection of the reputation of the deceased suspected wrongdoer.
click here
for full text via Springer [ON CAMPUS]
click here for full text via Springer [OFF CAMPUS]
'Theories of Crime and Punishment’, in The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law,
(Markus D Dubber and Tatjana Hörnle eds.), OUP 2014.
'A sense of law: on shared normative experiences', in Concepts of Law:
Comparative, Jurisprudential, and Social Science Perspectives, Seán Patrick
Donlan and Lukas Heckendorn Urscheler (eds.), Ashgate 2014.
'From Legal Pluralism to Public Justification', Erasmus Law Review 12/2013,
special issue on 'Law as a Plural Phenomenon' (Wibo van Rossum & Sanne Taekema
eds)
The paper offers an argument for a conception of legal pluralism, which has some substantive upshots and at least partly alleviates that legal pluralism may regress to rampant relativism. In particular, I will argue that law in its pluralist conception is inextricably linked to the requirement of public justification. This is not by way of appealing to any transcendental normative ideals but as a matter of entailment of the very practice of law. But, perhaps to the disappointment of many, this procedural requirement is the only practical consequence of the concept of law. For thicker, substantive limits to what law can do and for ways in which legal pluralism may be reduced in real contexts one will have to turn to the actual circumstances furnishing the law with content and a different kind of thinking about the law.
click here for full text
'A Social and Legal Theory of Re-Enchantment: Interpretivism, Argumentation, and
Law' Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic
Theory, Volume 19, Issue 4, pp. 609–623, December 2012
'Property offences as crimes of injustice' Criminal Law and Philosophy 6
(2) (2012) pp.149-166
The article provides an outline of the basic principles
and conditions of criminalisation of interferences with others’ property
rights in the context of a specific context: a liberal, social
democratic state, the legitimacy of which depends primarily on its
impartiality between moral doctrines and the fair distribution of
liberties and resources. I begin by giving a brief outline of the
conditions of political legitimacy, the place of property and the
conditions of criminalisation in such a state. With that framework in
place, I argue that interferences with others’ property rights should be
viewed as violations of political duties stemming from institutions of
distribution. I then discuss three implications of this view: the
bearing of social injustice on the criminal law treatment of acts of
distributive injustice; the expansion of criminalisation over the
violation of distribution-related duties, which are considered
criminally irrelevant under moral conceptions of criminalisation; and,
finally, the normative significance of the modus operandi.
click here
for full text via Springer [ON CAMPUS]
click here for full text via Springer [OFF CAMPUS]
‘Toward a Political Theory of Criminal Law: A Critical Rawlsian Account’, New
Criminal Law Review 15/1 (2012) pp. 122-155.
Email:
e.melissaris@lse.ac.uk
Ubiquitous
Law explores the possibility of understanding the law in dissociation from the
State while, at the same time, establishing the conditions of meaningful
communication between various legalities. This book argues that the enquiry into
the legal has been biased by the implicit or explicit presupposition of the
State's exclusivity to a claim to legality as well as the tendency to make the
enquiry into the law the task of experts, who purport to be able to represent
the legal community's commitments in an authoritative manner. Very worryingly,
the experts' point of view then becomes constitutive of the law and parasitic to
and distortive of people's commitments. Ubiquitous Law counter-suggests a new
methodology for legal theory, which will not be based on rigid epistemological
and normative assumptions but rather on self-reflection and mutual understanding
and critique, so as to establish acceptable differences on the basis of a
commonality.