Re-Reading Beccaria

Description

This book considers the way that Cesare Beccaria’s slim 1764 volume On Crimes and Punishments influenced policy developments worldwide and over decades, if not centuries, after its publication.
For those who turn to Beccaria’s work today, the encounter is shaped by that knowledge. Appreciative of his book’s dual nature as historical document and repository of ideas, the contributions in this collection address different aspects of the criminal justice theory Beccaria offered his readers and face up to methodological questions raised by meeting a historical text of this kind – unsystematic and by modern standards often under-argued – with modern scholarly conventions in mind.
Contributions in the first part of the book engage with Beccaria’s ‘political theory of criminal justice’ through the lenses of political and penal philosophy. How do we get from Beccaria’s blending of social-contractarian foundations and proto-utilitarian policy analysis to the concrete set of criminal justice practices Beccaria presents as justified?
This leads across to the second part where contributors approach Beccaria’s ideas with present-day reforms and developments in mind. Many of his policy proposals and arguments remain significant from our contemporary perspective, their limitations and omissions proving as instructive for the contemporary scholar as their more prescient elements.
The third part offers those looking at Beccaria’s work today a glimpse into the practical difficulties facing the firebrand author turned public servant during his long career in the Habsburg-Lombardian administration. It puts his work into the broader context of pathways to criminal justice reform in northern Italy, Habsburgian Lombardy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Beccaria’s day.

Antje du Bois-Pedain is Reader in Criminal Law and Philosophy at the Faculty of Law and Director of the Centre for Penal Theory and Penal Ethics in the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Shachar Eldar is Professor of Criminal Law at Ono Academic College, Tel Aviv, Israel.

Introduction
Antje du Bois-Pedain (University of Cambridge, UK) and Shachar Eldar (Ono Academic College, Israel)
Part I: Locating Beccaria’s Contribution to Penal and Political Philosophy
1. Beccaria’s Political Theory of Criminal Justice
Lorenzo Zucca (King’s College London, UK)
2. Reconstructing Beccaria’s Social Contract
Matt Matravers (University of York, UK)
3. Beccaria’s Contractarian Criminal Law: Jurisdiction, Punishments and Rewards
Antony Duff and S E Marshall (both of University of Stirling, UK)
4 Crime, Punishment and the Social Contract: Towards the Constitutionalisation of Criminal Law
Antje du Bois-Pedain (University of Cambridge, UK)
5. Beccaria, Treason and the Social Contract
Anat Scolnicov (Winchester University, UK)
6. Beccaria’s Secular Metaphysics: Pain, Time, and State Authority
Shai Lavi (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
7. Public Institutions Without Public Offices: Beccaria’s Use of Political Theory in the Reform of Criminal Justice
Malcolm Thorburn (University of Toronto, Canada)
8: Realism and the Rational Administration of the Law in Beccaria
Vincent Chia (University of Richmond, Canada)
Part II: Locating Beccaria in Present-Day Discourses on Criminal Justice
9. Beccaria Now: (Re)reading ‘On Crimes and Punishments’
Paul Roberts (University of Nottingham, UK)
10. Should Murder Be More Difficult to Prove than Theft? Beccaria and Differential Standards of Proof
Amit Pundik (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
11. Cesare Beccaria’s Integrative Deterrence Approach
Mordechai Kremnitzer (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) and Adi Gal (Yale Law School, USA)
12. Human Rights and Criminal Law: From Beccaria’s ‘On Crimes and Punishments’ to Modern Criminal Law
Miriam Gur-Arye (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
13. Beccaria on the Human Rights Committee? An Excursus on the Parameters of Human Rights and Penology
Leslie Sebba and Rachela Er’el (both of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) Part III: Locating Beccaria in the Criminal Justice Practice of His Time
14. Criminal Justice Reform in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hapsburgian Lombardy and Tuscany: Beccaria’s Policy Memoranda in Context
Antje du Bois-Pedain (University of Cambridge, UK)
Appendix 1: Brief observations on the General Code on Crimes and Punishments as regards policy offences [1787] by Cesare Beccaria (translated by J R Spencer)
Appendix 2: Opinion of the Undersigned Members of the Committee Charged with the Reform of the Criminal System in Austrian Lombardy for Matters Pertaining to Capital Punishment’ [1792] by Gallarati Scotti, Beccaria Bonesana and Risi (translated by Aaron Thomas and Jeremy Parzen; reprinted by permission of Toronto University Press)

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