by Penny Green, Andrew Rutherford (2000)
Criminal Policy in Transition comes along at a time when the literature in criminology is desperately short of "global" perspectives. It helps fill that gap while it presents important new insights into changing penal policy and practice. That it raises as many questions as it seems to answer is one of its great strengths. The authors write knowledgeably about their home societies without being prematurely bounded by comparative criteria. As a result,they develop a complex and uneven image of similarities and differences, of divergence and convergence through time. In this sense the collection offers a model of how international collaborative work should proceed. The book is the product of a workshop held at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in Onati, Spain. The IISL is a partnership between the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law and the Basque Government
Thomas P. Puccio with Dan Collins
During his 13 years as a federal prosecutor, Thomas Puccio unraveled the French Connection theft, prosecuted the first FBI agent ever convicted of corruption, and masterminded the Abscam investigation. He tells of turf wars inside the Justice Department and of deals cut between judges and attorneys, revealing an underside of law enforcement seldom seen by the public.
Deborah Halber
The Skeleton Crew provides an entree into the gritty and tumultuous world of Sherlock Holmes-wannabes who race to beat out law enforcement -- and one another -- at matching missing persons with unidentified remains. In America today, upwards of forty thousand people are dead and unaccounted for. These murder, suicide, and accident victims, separated from their names, are being adopted by the bizarre online world of amateur sleuths. It's DIY CSI by ordinary citizens equipped only with laptops and a knack for puzzles.
John Gardner
This selection of John Gardner's influential pieces in criminal law theory tackles persistent, troublesome questions including Which wrongs should be crimes and why? Should crimes ever be excused, and if so on what basis? What are the conditions of criminal responsibility, and how do they relate to conditions of moral responsibility?
Alan Brudner
"Alan Brudner suggests a conception of fundamental justice that liberals of competing philosophic schools may accept as fulfilling their own basic commitments. Employing this conception, he distils the essentials of liberal constitutionalism from the jurisprudence and practice of contemporary liberal-democratic states. Brudner argues that the model liberal-democratic constitution is best understood as a unity of three constitutional frameworks: libertarian, egalitarian, and communitarian. Each is based on a particular conception of public reason. Brudner criticizes these frameworks insofar as their organizing conceptions claim to be fundamental and moves forward to suggest a Hegelian conception of public reason within which each framework is contained as a constituent element of a whole." "When viewed in the light of this conception, the liberal constitution embodies a surprising synthesis. It reconciles a commitment to individual liberty and freedom of conscience with the perfectionist idea that the state ought to cultivate a type of personality whose fundamental ends are the goods essential to dignity. Such a reconciliation, the author suggests, may attract competing liberalisms to a consensus on an inclusive conception of public reason under which political authority is validated for those who share a confidence in the individual's inviolable worth."--BOOK JACKET.