The Boundaries of Blame
The Boundaries of Blame
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GBPHow can our criminal law retain legitimacy in an era of growing awareness about the complexities of human vulnerability and the far-reaching harm of punitive attitudes? The Boundaries of Blame makes a fresh contribution to the evolving scholarship on the relationship between criminal responsibility and social justice. It challenges the constricted view of personhood underpinning doctrines of responsibility, encouraging new conversations about longstanding questions on the role of circumstances like deprivation and trauma in excusing wrongdoing. Testing entrenched boundaries can provoke resistance, but the book argues that pushing past these limits is essential to fostering a more just framework of state blame in our present time and place. To achieve this objective, Kennefick proposes a bold yet pragmatic response in the form of a Universal Partial Defence, grounded in the Real Person Approach - a blueprint that offers a practical and humane pathway towards a fairer measure of criminal accountability.
- Revisits an old but important question: 'how can the criminal law do more to advance social justice in how it holds people responsible for crime?'
- Uses findings from social psychology and normative debates about vulnerability and recognition
- Packages complex political theory in an accessible way
Product details
August 2025Hardback
9781009386104
369 pages
229 × 152 mm
Not yet published - available from August 2025
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Part I. Purpose:
- 1. Activating the criminal law – establishing the duty to advance social justice
- Part II. Paradigm and Principle:
- 2. The real person approach – recognising vulnerability at culpability evaluation
- 3. Proportionality – recalibrating the desert calculus
- 4. Parsimony – offsetting misrecognition at culpability evaluation
- Part III. Partial Excuse (Practice, Doctrine, and Theory):
- 5. Universality – understanding and expanding the bounds of partial excuse
- 6. Diminished responsibility – exploring the template for the UPD
- 7. Bounded causal theory – rethinking the rationale of partial excuse
- Part IV. Proposal:
- 8. The universal partial defence – outlining a blueprint for reform
- Summary of key contributions.
