The course is focused on historical texts, most of them philosophical. Context for understanding the texts and the course of democratic development will be provided in lecture and discussions, and by some background readings (Dunn). We begin with the remarkable Athenian democracy, and its frequent enemy the Spartan oligarchy. In Athens legislation was passed directly by an assembly of all citizens, and executive officials were selected by lot rather than by competitive election. Athenian oligarchs such as Plato more admired Sparta, and their disdain for the democracy became the judgment of the ages, until well after the modern democratic revolutions. Marsilius of Padua in the early Middle Ages argued for popular sovereignty. The Italian citystates of the Middle Ages did without kings, and looked back to Rome and Greece for republican models. During the English Civil War republicans debated whether the few or the many should be full citizens of the regime. The English, French, and American revolutions struggled with justifying and establishing a representative democracy suitable for a large state, and relied on election rather than lot to select officials. The English established a constitutional monarchy, admired in Europe, and adapted by the Americans in their republican constitution. The American Revolution helped inspire the French, and the French inspired republican and democratic revolution throughout Europe during the 19 century.

/pdf/democracy-and-its-critics-2zxg086s7q.pdf

Democracy and Its Critics

Governing through Crime in South AfricaWarum Nationen scheiternGoverning Immigration Through CrimeMafia-LebenScaleDer VorsorgestaatHandbuch JugendkriminalitätThe Crime ConundrumDie SicherheitsgesellschaftDurchbrüche ins Soziale eine Festschrift für Rudolph BauerKriminalitätskontrolle als IndustrieStrafanstalt als BesserungsmaschineDie Vielfalt des RegierensThe Social Sustainability of CitiesGoverning through Crime in South AfricaSurveillance and GovernanceGoverning Through CrimeOrganized crimeDemocratic Theory and Mass IncarcerationCheliax Imperium der Teufel11-SepDefinition und Grenzen der Vorverlagerung von StrafbarkeitMass Incarceration on TrialAlternative CriminologiesGoverning Through Crime : How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of FearCriminal Justice Theory, Volume 26Governing through crime?Laws against strikes. The South African Experience in an international and Comparative PerspectiveIntroduction to critical criminologyGoverning Through Crime in the Northern Territory: Are Criminal Justice System Changes Contributing to Rising Indigenous Imprisonment?After the War on CrimeGoverning Through CrimeInterdisziplinäre RechtsforschungDer CSI-Effekt in DeutschlandThe Contested Politics of MobilityGoverning through Globalised CrimeNeue Theorien des RechtsGoverning Through Globalised CrimeCriminological PerspectivesThe Legal Process and the Promise of Justice

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/nclr.2009.12.1.129

:Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear

The expansion of the US carceral state has been accompanied by the emergence of what we call the ‘shadow carceral state’. Operating beyond the confines of criminal law and justice institutions, the shadow carceral state expands penal power through institutional annexation and legal hybridity, including: (1) increased civil and administrative pathways to incarceration; (2) the creation of civil ‘alternatives’ to invalidated criminal statutes; and (3) the incorporation of criminal law into administrative legal processes in ways that enhance state carceral power. Although legal doctrine deems civil and administration sanctions to be ‘not-punishment’, we call for a broad understanding of penal power and the carceral state.

Mapping the shadow carceral state: Toward an institutionally capacious approach to punishment

‘Vulnerability’ is now a popular term in the lexicon of every-day life and a notion frequently drawn upon by policy-makers, academics, journalists, welfare workers and local authorities. This essay explores some of the ethical and practical implications of ‘vulnerability’ as a concept in social welfare. It highlights how ideas about vulnerability shape the ways in which we manage and classify people, justify state intervention in citizens’ lives, allocate resources in society and define our social obligations. The lack of clarity and limited analysis of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ in welfare arenas is highlighted as concerning, particularly given that those seen as most in need of support seem to be implicated in commonly held views about ‘the vulnerable’. I argue that far from being innocuous, ‘vulnerability’ is so loaded with political, moral and practical implications that it is potentially damaging to the pursuit of social justice. Two opposing presentations of the notion are set out in order to il...

‘Vulnerability’: Handle with Care

This article analyses the recent expansion of immigration offences and the reasons for relying on the criminal law and its institutions for immigration enforcement. By relating the scholarship on (over) criminalisation with the growth of immigration offences, it explains the origins of the use of criminal law for regulatory purposes and their influence in the immigration control system in Britain. The great reliance on the criminal law to regulate immigration in the last two decades is distinctive of a period in which crime and immigration have been increasingly politicised. In immigration enforcement, criminal law serves both symbolic and practical purposes as many of these offences are used primarily as threats to enforce compliance and against those who cannot be removed.

Making People Criminal: The Role of the Criminal Law in Immigration Enforcement

Offers an original explanatory theory of current trends in criminal law and criminal justice policy 
Develops a theoretical explanation of the criminal law from a detailed analysis and reconstruction of New Labour's penal policies 
Explains how preventive criminal laws have arisen from a deficit of political authority rather than from excessive authoritarianism
The Insecurity State is a book about the recent emergence of a 'right to security' in the UK's criminal law. The Insecurity State sets out from a detailed analysis of the law of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order and of the Coalition government's proposed replacement for it. It shows that the liabilities contained in both seek to protect a 'freedom from fear'and that this 'right to security' explains a lot of other recently enacted criminal offences. This book identifies the normative source of this right to security in the idea of vulnerable autonomy. It demonstrates that the vulnerability of autonomy is an axiomatic assumption of political theories that have enjoyed a preponderant influence right across the political mainstream. It considers the influence of these normative commitments on the policy of both the New Labour and the Coalition governments. The Insecurity State then explores how the wider contemporary criminal law also institutionalizes the right to security, and how this differs from the law's earlier protection of security interests. It examines the right to security, and its attendant penal liabilities, in the context of both human rights protection and normative criminal law theories. Finally the book exposes the paradoxical claims about the state's authority that are entailed by penal laws that assume the vulnerability of the normal, representative citizen. The Insecurity State offers a criminal law theory that is unorthodox in both its method and its content: 
It is focused on a contemporary development in the 'special part' of the criminal law rather than the law's general principles. 
It is an explanatory political sociology of substantive criminal law rather than the more familiar normative theory; but it is an explanatory theory that seeks to understand the law's historical development through an investigation of the changing character of its normative order. 
It does not apply a pre-existing sociological or philosophical theory to the law; rather it develops a theoretical explanation from detailed legal analysis and reconstruction of New Labour's penal laws. 
It concludes that repressive criminal laws have arisen from a deficit of political authority rather than from excessive authoritarianism. 


Readership: Academics, postgraduate students and undergraduate students in criminal law, criminology and criminal justice; academics and postgraduate students in legal and political theory, government, sociology or social policy; criminal law and criminal justice practitioners working on the ASBO.

The Insecurity State: Vulnerable Autonomy and the Right to Security in the Criminal Law

This paper seeks to explain two problems posed by the history of criminal law doctrine by situating them in the context of the political sociology of citizenship. First, the paper outlines the logical connection between the rise to doctrinal orthodoxy of the idea of the responsible subject and the contemporaneous emergence of universal political citizenship. Secondly, it argues that subjectivist orthodoxy in doctrine may be reconciled with the apparently antithetical forms of regulatory strict liability law within the terms of ‘modern democratic citizenship’ as the latter were conceptualised by T. H. Marshall. Finally, by means of a comparison with Alan Brudner's recent philosophical rationalisation of the modern criminal law, it proposes that situating the criminal law in its environment of citizenship will help us to understand better the tensions that underlie contemporary challenges to its doctrine.

The Responsible Subject As Citizen: Criminal Law, Democracy And The Welfare State

Criminologists and criminal law theorists have explained the ASBO and the terrorism Control Order as purely instrumental measures in the service of crime control. The political consent enjoyed by these new Civil Preventative Orders has for the most part been regarded in the expert literature as an example of penal populism which has thrown aside sound legal principles. This paper, by contrast, investigates a possible normative basis for these orders. It first analyses and reconstructs their substantive law, arguing that they impose a liability for manifesting a disposition which fails to reassure others. It then investigates the basis for this liability in official anti-social behaviour and counter-terrorism policy, both of which emphasise the vulnerability of normal citizens. The paper then proposes that the ‘vulnerable autonomy’ which these policies and legal instruments seek to protect is an axiomatic feature of the political theories of ‘advanced liberalism’. Finally, the claim made by normative criminal law theorists that Civil Preventative Orders are illegitimate is reconsidered in the light of the theory of vulnerable autonomy.

The theory of vulnerable autonomy and the legitimacy of the civil preventative order

In this article, I test the claims of the UK government and universities that the Prevent programme aims to create a safe space for the discussion of ‘extremist’ ideas in universities. I do this by comparing the main elements of the Prevent duty that has been imposed on universities with those of safe spaces as imagined by student campaigners and some educational writers. I conclude that, while there are manifest and significant differences in the harms that the two strategies aim to prevent, and in the sources, nature and targets of the coercion that the two strategies entail, their overall form and the underlying assumptions that rationalise them are shared. I consider some implications of their differences and of their shared characteristics for the critics of the two strategies.

/pdf/is-prevent-a-safe-space-310rt7rej8.pdf

Peter Ramsay

Papers

The Insecurity State: Vulnerable Autonomy and the Right to Security in the Criminal Law

The Responsible Subject As Citizen: Criminal Law, Democracy And The Welfare State

The theory of vulnerable autonomy and the legitimacy of the civil preventative order

Is Prevent a safe space

The insecurity state