Louise Kennefick – författare

How 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 long-standing 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, Louise 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.

Presenting cutting-edge research and scholarship, this extensive volume covers everything from abstract theorising about the meanings of responsibility and how we blame, to analysing criminal law and justice responses, and factors that impact individual responsibility.Inviting exchanges across a burgeoning critical scholarship on criminal responsibility, this Handbook showcases the diverse range of methodologies applied to the field, including socio-political approaches, critical historical methods, criminological and sociological perspectives, and interdisciplinary studies bridging law and the mind sciences. Spanning global networks of established and emerging scholars of responsibility for crime, this book explores how we relate to one another as human beings under the spotlight of the criminal law. In doing so, it is hoped that the collection not only does justice to the vibrant landscape of criminal responsibility studies, but inspires new directions and future synergies in this compelling field.The Routledge International Handbook of Criminal Responsibility will appeal to scholars and students of criminal law, criminal justice, criminology, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and socio-legal studies, as well as practitioners and policymakers working in related fields.