Penny Crofts – författare

Placing contemporary technological developments in their historical context, this book argues for the importance of law in their regulation. Technological developments are focused upon overcoming physical and human constraints. There are no normative constraints inherent in the quest for ongoing and future technological development. In contrast, law proffers an essential normative constraint. Just because we can do something, does not mean that we should. Through the application of critical legal theory and jurisprudence to pro-actively engage with technology, this book demonstrates why legal thinking should be prioritised in emerging technological futures. This book articulates classic skills and values such as ethics and justice to ensure that future and ongoing legal engagements with socio-technological developments are tempered by legal normative constraints.Encouraging them to foreground questions of justice and critique when thinking about law and technology, the book addresses law students and teachers, lawyers and critical thinkers concerned with the proliferation of technology in our lives.

Placing contemporary technological developments in their historical context, this book argues for the importance of law in their regulation. Technological developments are focused upon overcoming physical and human constraints. There are no normative constraints inherent in the quest for ongoing and future technological development. In contrast, law proffers an essential normative constraint. Just because we can do something, does not mean that we should. Through the application of critical legal theory and jurisprudence to pro-actively engage with technology, this book demonstrates why legal thinking should be prioritised in emerging technological futures. This book articulates classic skills and values such as ethics and justice to ensure that future and ongoing legal engagements with socio-technological developments are tempered by legal normative constraints.Encouraging them to foreground questions of justice and critique when thinking about law and technology, the book addresses law students and teachers, lawyers and critical thinkers concerned with the proliferation of technology in our lives.

The criminal legal system defines and authoritatively enacts the boundaries of permissible and impermissible behaviour, with a focus on that which is prohibited or transgressive. Wickedness and Crime: Laws of Homicide and Malice seeks to expose the ways in which criminal law communicates and sanctions particular models of wickedness. This book illuminates the intimate relationship of crime and definitions of wrongdoing. A central contention of the book is that if a criminal legal system empty of normative content is undesirable and implausible, then we must think critically about the types of models of wickedness that are communicated by criminal legal doctrine. Through historical and contemporary analysis of the legal concept of malice, Penny Crofts examines the types of models of wickedness that are established through criminal legal doctrine. The book draws upon literature, philosophy and jurisprudence to place wickedness at the centre of an account of criminal law. Arguing that the current dominant idea of wickedness communicated in criminal law lacks nuance and clarity, this book examines the implications in terms of the legal subject, social responsibility and the jurisdiction of the legal system. Through historical accounts of malice the book provides resources to enrich a contemporary jurisprudence of blaming.A fascinating contribution to the study of law, this book will interest criminal legal scholars who seek a deeper understanding of the complexity of the relationship between law and morality. The book also provides a resource for legal theorists and philosophers of wickedness, supplying a sustained example and analysis of the implications of types of models of culpability.

This book elaborates and interrogates the idea of evil corporations from a diverse range of disciplines.There has long been awareness of systemic harms inflicted by corporations, but this awareness has rarely led to any effective legal means to prevent and/or respond adequately to them. Lawyers and legal theorists appear to be stuck asking the same questions, and giving the same ineffective answers. Part of the problem, this book maintains, is the relative lack of theoretical interrogation into the nature of corporations as responsible, moral agents. To break this stasis, this book draws upon philosophies of wickedness in order to ask whether or not corporations are, or can be, evil. With contributions from a range of different disciplines, including law, cultural theory, theology, and philosophy, it offers a novel account of how and why corporate wrongs are caused, whilst exploring the extent to which the legal system itself facilitates such wrongdoing.The book targets a broad international audience with research interests in corporate crime. This will be of particular interest to those within the legal discipline, including corporate law, criminal law, corporate crime and law and humanities scholars.Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book argues that corporate harms can and should be conceptualised as horrific because they are novel forms of damage on an unprecedented scale.There is long-term recognition of widespread, systemic harms caused by corporations and the relative dearth of response by the criminal legal system. This book argues that the harms caused by corporations generate a category crisis for criminal law. Leaving aside the difficulties that criminal law has in conceptualising the corporation as a criminal legal subject, corporate harms in and of themselves raise categorical challenges because they are beyond the imagination of the criminal law in terms of magnitude, size, type, and quality. Corporate harms tend not to be the subject of criminal law because they are too vast, too diffuse, and too disturbing for existing legal categories. Drawing on criminal law, criminology, cultural legal studies, and horror as both genre and affect, this book reconceptualises corporate harm through the lens of horror. It argues that corporate violence is structurally horrific in its scale, temporality, spatial reach, ordinariness, and institutional betrayal.This book will appeal to scholars and students with relevant interests in legal theory, law and literature, criminal law, criminology and cultural studies.

This book elaborates and interrogates the idea of evil corporations from a diverse range of disciplines.There has long been awareness of systemic harms inflicted by corporations, but this awareness has rarely led to any effective legal means to prevent and/or respond adequately to them. Lawyers and legal theorists appear to be stuck asking the same questions, and giving the same ineffective answers. Part of the problem, this book maintains, is the relative lack of theoretical interrogation into the nature of corporations as responsible, moral agents. To break this stasis, this book draws upon philosophies of wickedness in order to ask whether or not corporations are, or can be, evil. With contributions from a range of different disciplines, including law, cultural theory, theology, and philosophy, it offers a novel account of how and why corporate wrongs are caused, whilst exploring the extent to which the legal system itself facilitates such wrongdoing.The book targets a broad international audience with research interests in corporate crime. This will be of particular interest to those within the legal discipline, including corporate law, criminal law, corporate crime and law and humanities scholars.Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.