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The Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice remains the premier reference tool that presents the state of the art in the field of reckoning with the legacy of past gross human rights abuses. Almost 200 scholars and practitioners from all continents summarize country efforts to address and redress the recent past, and present key transitional justice methods, debates, institutions and concepts. Both state and non-state initiatives are concisely overviewed. Written in an accessible style but with an eye to detail and accuracy, the entries include the latest research in the field and provide suggestions for further readings. Widely consulted by academics, practitioners, government officials and civil society representatives, the Encyclopedia is unmatched in the number of countries, institutions, debates, as well as methods, programs and practices it covers.
Featuring chapters authored by leading scholars in the fields of criminology, critical race studies, history, and more, The Cambridge Handbook of Race and Surveillance cuts across history and geography to provide a detailed examination of how race and surveillance intersect throughout space and time. The volume reviews surveillance technology from the days of colonial conquest to the digital era, focusing on countries such as the United States, Canada, the UK, South Africa, the Philippines, India, Brazil, and Palestine. Weaving together narratives on how technology and surveillance have developed over time to reinforce racial discrimination, the book delves into the often-overlooked origins of racial surveillance, from skin branding, cranial measurements, and fingerprinting to contemporary manifestations in big data, commercial surveillance, and predictive policing. Lucid, accessible, and expertly researched, this handbook provides a crucial investigation of issues spanning history and at the forefront of contemporary life.
European Criminal Law has developed into a complex, jagged subject matter, which at the same time has become increasingly important for everyday criminal law practice. On the one hand, this work aims to do comprehensive justice to the complexity of the matter without sacrificing readability. In order to achieve this, the book's structure enables legal scholars and experienced practitioners to access the information relevant to them in a targeted manner and, at the same time, enables less oriented readers to gain access to European criminal law. Thus, the volume both answers basic questions and offers discussion in more specialised areas. Written by experts in the field, the book offers discussions which are both of the highest academic standards and accessibly readable.
Establishing individual criminal responsibility for mass atrocities is the foundational principle of international criminal justice, but this process is highly complex, and is accompanied by political and legal dilemmas about its operation. The book examines the drafting, interpretation, and application of the rules for assessing individual criminal responsibility as those rules emerge from the intense contestations among judges, lawyers, and academics within the legal field. Focusing on the International Criminal Court (ICC), the book provides a rich analysis of the international debates around questions of criminal responsibility by interrogating formal legal documents and legal scholarship alongside more candid accounts (interviews, memoirs, minutes). These debates are of key importance for international criminal law and global justice because how criminal responsibility laws are construed in practice determines which conduct merits punishment and, ultimately, demarcates the boundaries of what are considered the 'gravest' acts that 'shock' humanity.
The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights details how capital punishment violates universal human rights-to life; to be free from torture and other forms of cruelty; to be treated in a non-arbitrary, non-discriminatory manner; and to dignity. In tracing the evolution of the world's understanding of torture, which now absolutely prohibits physical and psychological torture, the book argues that an immutable characteristic of capital punishment-already outlawed in many countries and American states-is that it makes use of death threats. Mock executions and other credible death threats, in fact, have long been treated as torturous acts. When crime victims are threatened with death and are helpless to prevent their deaths, for example, courts routinely find such threats inflict psychological torture. With simulated executions and non-lethal corporal punishments already prohibited as torturous acts, death sentences and real executions, the book contends, must be classified as torturous acts, too.
'Is it possible to be both a judge and a feminist?' Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Criminal Law Opinions answers that question in the affirmative by re-writing seminal opinions that implicate critical dimensions of criminal law jurisprudence, from the sexual assault law to provocation to cultural defences to the death penalty. Right now, one in three Americans has a criminal record, mass incarceration and over-criminalization are the norm, and our jails cycle through about ten million people each year. At the same time, sexual assaults are rarely prosecuted at all, domestic violence remains pervasive, and the distribution of punishment, and by extension justice, seems not only raced and classed, but also gendered. We have had #MeToo campaigns and #SayHerName campaigns, and yet not enough has changed. How might all of justice look different through a feminist lens. This book answers that question.
The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors – historical, political, and institutional – that led to the current system of mass imprisonment. The book examines the causes and impacts of mass incarceration on both the political and criminal justice systems. With accessible language and straightforward statistical analysis, former prosecutor turned law professor Jeffrey Bellin provides a formula for reform to return to the low incarceration rates that characterized the United States prior to the 1970s.
Emerging neurotechnology offers increasingly individualised brain information, enabling researchers to identify mental states and content. When accurate and valid, these brain-reading technologies also provide data that could be useful in criminal legal procedures, such as memory detection with EEG and the prediction of recidivism with fMRI. Yet, unlike in medicine, individuals involved in criminal cases will often be reluctant to undergo brain-reading procedures. This raises the question of whether coercive brain-reading could be permissible in criminal law. Coercive Brain-Reading in Criminal Justice examines this question in view of European human rights: the prohibition of ill-treatment, the right to privacy, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the privilege against self-incrimination. The book argues that, at present, the established framework of human rights does not exclude coercive brain-reading. It does, however, delimit the permissible use of forensic brain-reading without valid consent. This cautionary, cutting-edge book lays a crucial foundation for understanding the future of criminal legal proceedings in a world of ever-advancing neurotechnology.
Combining interdisciplinary techniques with original ethnographic fieldwork, Christoph Sperfeldt examines the first attempts of international criminal courts to provide reparations to victims of mass atrocities. The observations focus on two case studies: the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, where Sperfeldt spent over ten years working at and around, and the International Criminal Court's interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Enriched with first-hand observations and an awareness of contextual dynamics, this book directs attention to the 'social life of reparations' that too often get lost in formal accounts of law and its institutions. Sperfeldt shows that reparations are constituted and contested through a range of practices that produce, change, and give meaning to reparations. Appreciating the nature and effects of these practices provides us with a deeper understanding of the discrepancies that exist between the reparations ideal and how it functions imperfectly in different contexts.
When a death is investigated by a coroner, what is the place of the family in that process? This accessibly written book develops a nuanced analysis of the contemporary inquest system in England and Wales.
International criminal justice is, at its core, an anti-atrocity project. Yet just what an 'atrocity' is remains undefined and undertheorized. This book examines how associations between atrocity commission and the production of horrific spectacles shape the processes through which international crimes are identified and conceptualized, leading to the foregrounding of certain forms of mass violence and the backgrounding or complete invisibilization of others. In doing so, it identifies various, seemingly banal ways through which international crimes may be committed and demonstrates how the criminality of such forms of violence and abuse tends to be obfuscated. This book suggests that the failure to address these 'invisible atrocities' represents a major flaw in the current international criminal justice system, one that produces a host of problematic repercussions and undermines the legal legitimacy of international criminal law itself.
The trans-jurisdictional discourse on criminal justice is often hampered by mutual misunderstandings. The translation of legal concepts from English into other languages and vice versa is subject to ambiguity and potential error: the same term may assume different meanings in different legal contexts. More importantly, legal systems may choose differing theoretical or policy approaches to resolving the same issues, which sometimes – but not always – lead to similar outcomes. This book is the second volume of a series in which eminent scholars from German-speaking and Anglo-American jurisdictions work together on comparative essays that explore foundational concepts of criminal law and procedure. Each topic is illuminated from German and Anglo-American perspectives, and differences and similarities are analysed.
Drawing on first-hand accounts of police officers, solicitors, barristers, prison workers, suspects, convicts and their families in South Wales, this book uncovers how austerity affects the everyday working of the criminal process.
How do we make sense of complex evidence? What are the cognitive principles that allow detectives to solve crimes, and lay people to puzzle out everyday problems? To address these questions, David Lagnado presents a novel perspective on human reasoning. At heart, we are causal thinkers driven to explain the myriad ways in which people behave and interact. We build mental models of the world, enabling us to infer patterns of cause and effect, linking words to deeds, actions to effects, and crimes to evidence. But building models is not enough; we need to evaluate these models against evidence, and we often struggle with this task. We have a knack for explaining, but less skill at evaluating. Fortunately, we can improve our reasoning by reflecting on inferential practices and using formal tools. This book presents a system of rational inference that helps us evaluate our models and make sounder judgments.
Drawing on interviews with women in precarious work, this text explores the everyday problems they face balancing work and care responsibilities. This crucial book exposes the failures of family-friendly rights and explains how to grant these women effective rights in the wake of COVID-19.
The archives produced by international courts have received little empirical, theoretical or methodological attention within international criminal justice (ICJ) or international relations (IR) studies. Yet, as this book argues, these archives both contain a significant record of past violence, and also help to constitute the international community as a particular reality. As such, this book first offers an interdisciplinary reading of archives, integrating new insights from IR, archival science and post-colonial anthropology to establish the link between archives and community formation. It then focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's archive, to offer a critical reading of how knowledge is produced in international courts, provides an account of the type of international community that is imagined within these archives, and establishes the importance of the materiality of archives for understanding how knowledge is produced and contested within the international domain.
Although most countries around the world use professional judges, they also rely on lay citizens, untrained in the law, to decide criminal cases. The participation of lay citizens helps to incorporate community perspectives into legal outcomes and to provide greater legitimacy for the legal system and its verdicts. This book offers a comprehensive and comparative picture of how nations use lay people in legal decision-making. It provides a much-needed, in-depth analysis of the different approaches to citizen participation and considers why some countries' use of lay participation is long-standing whereas other countries alter or abandon their efforts. This book examines the many ways in which countries around the world embrace, reject, or reform the way in which they use ordinary citizens in legal decision-making.
Despite being in existence for over a quarter century, costing multiple millions of dollars and affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals, sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws have yet to be subject to a book-length treatment of their empirical dimensions - their premises, coverage, and impact on public safety. This volume, edited by Wayne Logan and J.J. Prescott, assembles the leading researchers in the field to provide an in-depth look at what have come to be known as 'Megan's Laws', offering a social science-based analysis of one of the most important, and controversial, criminal justice system initiatives undertaken in modern times.
Day fines, as a pecuniary sanction, have a great potential to reduce inequality in the criminal sentencing system, as they impose the same relative punishment on all offenders irrespective of their income. Furthermore, with correct implementation, they can constitute an alternative sanction to the more repressive and not always efficient short-term prison sentences. Finally, by independently expressing in the sentence the severity and the income of the offender, day fines can increase uniformity and transparency of sentencing. Having this in mind, almost half of the European Union countries have adopted day fines in their criminal justice system. For the first time, this book makes their findings accessible to a wider international audience. Aimed at scholars, policy makers and criminal law practitioners, it provides an opportunity to learn about the theoretical advantages, the practical challenges, the successes and failures, and ways to improve.