To date, regulatory scholarship has mainly been applied to specific legislative programs and/or agencies for the social and economic regulation of business. In this volume, a cast of internationally renowned legal scholars each apply a 'regulatory perspective' to their own area of law. The volume examines the collision of regulation by law with regulation by other means and provides an innovative regulatory perspective for the whole of law.

H.L.A. Hart was the pre-eminent legal philosopher of the twentieth century. As a scholar he single-handedly reinvented the philosophy of law and revolutionized our understanding of law as a social institution. Hart's approach to legal philosophy was at once disarmingly simple and breathtakingly ambitious, combining the insights of the Utilitarian tradition and the new linguistic philosophy of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He sought to elucidate a concept of law that would be of relevance to all forms of law, wherever or whenever they arose.
This book is both an intellectual and a...

This work focuses on the theory of punishment in the context of other political questions, such as the function and scope of the criminal law. It criticizes the fundamental liberal philosophical assumptions underlying much of the modern tradition of theorizing about punishment, and argues instead for a conception of the justifying social functions of punishment proceeding from a different set of assumptions and a different background in political philosophy.

Over the last two decades, and in the wake of increases in recorded crime and other social changes, British criminal justice policy has become increasingly politicised as an index of governments' competence. New and worrying developments, such as the inexorable rise of the US prison population and the rising force of penal severity, seem unstoppable in the face of popular anxiety about crime. But is this inevitable? Nicola Lacey argues that harsh 'penal populism' is not the inevitable fate of all contemporary democracies. Notwithstanding a degree of convergence, globalisation has left many of...

This text presents a feminist critique of law based on an analysis of the ways in which the structure or method of modern law is gendered. All of the essays in the book engage at some level with the question of whether there are things of a general nature to be said about what might be called the sex or gender of law. Ranging across fields including criminal law, public law and anti-discrimination law, the essays examine the conceptual framework of modern legal practices: the legal conception of the subject as individual; the concepts of equality, freedom, justice and rights; and the legal...

In the early 18th Century, Daniel Defoe found it natural to write a novel whose heroine was a sexually adventurous, socially marginal property offender. Only half a century later, this would have been next to unthinkable. Lacey explores the disappearance of Moll, and her supercession in the annals of literary female offenders by heroines like Tess, serving as a metaphor for fundamental changes in ideas of selfhood, gender and social order in 18th and 19th Century England. Drawing on law, literature, philosophy and social history, she argues that these broad changes underpinned a radical shift...

This text presents a feminist critique of law based on an analysis of the ways in which the structure or method of modern law is gendered. All of the essays in the book engage at some level with the question of whether there are things of a general nature to be said about what might be called the sex or gender of law. Ranging across fields including criminal law, public law and anti-discrimination law, the essays examine the conceptual framework of modern legal practices: the legal conception of the subject as individual; the concepts of equality, freedom, justice and rights; and the legal...

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.