Philosophy

I work mainly on the philosophy of criminal law - in particular on the philosophy of punishment, on issues that connect philosophy of action with the basic principles of criminal liability, and on the moral and political preconditions of criminal liability. My books are Trials and Punishments (CUP, 1986); Intention, Agency and Criminal Liability (Blackwell, 1990); Criminal Attempts (OUP, 1996); Punishment, Communication and Community (OUP 2000); Answering for Crime (Hart 2007), and (with Lindsay Farmer, Sandra Marshall and Victor Tadros) The Trial on Trial (3): Towards a Normative Theory of the Criminal Trial (Hart 2007).

I have also edited collections of readings on punishment, and edited and contributed to collections of new essays on criminal law theory (Philosophy and the Criminal Law: Principle and Critique, CUP 1998; Defining Crimes, OUP 2005; Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law, OUP 2011).

My main current project is to write a book on criminalization (The Realm of the Criminal Law). This flows from a four-year AHRC-funded project on Criminalization that four colleagues (Sandra Marshall of this Department, Lindsay Farmer of Glasgow Law School, Victor Tadros of Warwick Law School, and Massimo Renzo of York Law School) and I have been running: the project will produce a seven volume mini-series published by Oxford University Press—four volumes of papers from conferences and workshops (The Boundaries of the Criminal Law, 2010; The Structures of the Criminal Law, 2011; The Constitution of the Criminal Law, 2012; The Grounds of Criminalization, 2013) and monographs from three of the researchers.