Re-Situating Criminal Responsibility

Abstract

Inspired by the work of Nicola Lacey as a leading critical criminal responsibility scholar, in my chapter, I offer a reflection on time and space and criminal responsibility. I introduce the notion of interstitial space as a useful analytical device to advance the field of critical scholarship on responsibility for crime. With a study of the intellectual sphere of comparative jurisprudence at around the turn of the twentieth century, which I suggest was an historical example of an interstitial space, I argue that such interstitial spaces form part of the story of the development of ideas of responsibility for crime. In comparative jurisprudence, national laws and legal systems were viewed from a transnational vantage point, and, as such, legal analysis was simultaneously embedded and disembedded, both tied to territorial space and free-floating. My examination of the first decades of the life of a key institutional text of comparative jurisprudence, the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation, shows that discussion of crime, punishment, and criminal justice encompassed an informative discussion of responsibility, with the light of comparative jurisprudence revealing the connection between criminal responsibility and broader ideas about ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’, which themselves reflected power relations between states.