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"Respect and Resistance in Punishment Theory"

By Douglas A. Berman

This title of this post is the title of this intriguing new article available via SSRN.  The piece comes from the always interesting Professor Alice Ristoph, and here is the abstract:Is it coherent to speak of a right to resist justified punishment?  Thomas Hobbes thought so. This essay seeks first to (re)introduce Hobbes as a punishment theorist, and second to use Hobbes to examine what it means to respect the criminal even as we punish him.  Hobbes is almost entirely neglected by scholars of criminal law, whose theoretical inquiries focus on liberal, rights-based accounts of retribution (often exemplified by Immanuel Kant) and claims of deterrence or other consequentialist benefits (elucidated, for example, by Jeremy Bentham)...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on September 01, 2008 (boomark / email).