The Baldy Center invites all faculty and graduate students to attend a workshop on June 11-12, 2005 on Modern Histories of Crime and Punishment organized by Markus Dubber, UB Law, and Lindsay Farmer, Law, University of Glasgow.

Description

In recent years histories of criminal law and the criminal justice process have broadened their focus from the social context of crime and law enforcement to include the concepts and categories of the criminal law itself. This work has emerged from a range of different intellectual and disciplinary traditions. Social historians of crime have looked at the changing contours of criminal liability in respect of particular crimes such as homicide or assault, or in relation to defenses such as insanity; from within cultural studies there have come a number of readings of particular trials or historical episodes that have thrown light on the social and cultural assumptions that ground ideas and concepts.

Post-colonial theory has examined the place of law in the imperial project and used this perspective to challenge conventional thinking about Anglo-American criminal law. And criminal lawyers themselves have begun to take a closer interest in the historical development of concepts of criminal liability as a way of challenging certain taken-for-granted assumptions about responsibility. The Baldy workshop brings together people from these different backgrounds and disciplines as a way of encouraging dialogue and exchange in this rapidly developing field.

Participants and Program

Saturday, June 11, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Sunday, June 12, 9:00 am - 12:00 noon
545 O'Brian Hall, University at Buffalo Law School
The State University of New York, North Campus, Buffalo, NY

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Nicola Lacey Character, Capacity and Opportunity

Lindsay Farmer Changing Conceptions of Criminal Responsibility and  the Proof of Guilt 1836-1898

Joel Eigen “The Indices of Things Unseen”: Searching for Human Agency in Medicine and the Law

Guyora Binder From Killing to Causing: The Transformation of Homicide

Markus Dubber Deter, Reform, Exterminate: Republican Punishment Between Police and Law

Gerry Leonard Holmes on Crime

Mariana Valverde “The Crime that Must Not be Named among Christians” and Its Successors: Sodomites, Homosexuals, and Respectable Same-Sex Couples

Martin Wiener Probing the Fault Lines of Imperial Authority: Inter-racial Homicide Trials in the British Empire 1880-1930

Elizabeth Kolsky Crime without Punishment: British Criminals in Colonial India

Wendie Schneider Enfeebling the Arm of Justice

Benjamin Hett The “Eden Dance Palace Trial” of 1931: Politics and Criminal Law in Weimar Germany

Bruce P. Smith The Myth of Private Prosecution in England, 1790-1850

Confirmed Participants

Guyora Binder

is UB Distinguished Professor of Law at SUNY Buffalo School of Law and author, most recently, of “The Origins of American Felony Murder Rules,” 57 Stanford Law Review 59 (2004) and Literary Criticisms of Law (with Robert Weisberg 2000).

Markus Dubber

is Professor of Law and Director, Buffalo Criminal Law Center at SUNY Buffalo School of Law and author, most recently, of The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (2005), Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims’ Rights (2002), and “The Right to Be Punished: Autonomy and Its Demise in Modern Penal Thought,” 16 Law & History Review 113 (1998).

Joel Eigen

is Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Franklin & Marshall College and author, most recently, of Unconscious Crime: Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London (2003) and Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-doctors in the English Court (1995).

Lindsay Farmer

is Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow School of Law and author, most recently, of Criminal Law, Tradition and Legal Order. Crime and the Genius of Scots Law 1747 to the Present (1997), The State of Scots Law. Law and Government after the Devolution Settlement (ed. with S. Veitch 2001), and “Reconstructing the English Codification Debate: The Criminal Law Commissioners, 1833–45,” which was the subject of a scholarly forum in Law & History Review 18:2 (2000).

Benjamin Hett

is Assistant Professor of History at Hunter College, CUNY, and author, most recently, of Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser's Berlin (2004).

Elizabeth Kolsky

is Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University.  Her dissertation, “The Body Evidencing the Crime’: Gender, Law and Medicine in Colonial India,” examines the codification of criminal law in India and its unintended consequences for the status of women in colonial and post-colonial South Asia, and illuminates the origins and implications of the British rulers’ ideas about Indian difference. 

Nicola Lacey

is Professor of Criminal Law at the London School of Economics & Political Science and author, most recently, of A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (2004), Reconstructing Criminal Law (with Celia Wells & Oliver Quick, 3d ed. 2003), and “Responsibility and Modernity in Criminal Law,” 9 Journal of Political Philosophy 249 (2001).

Gerry Leonard

is Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law and author, most recently, of The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois (2002) and “Towards a Legal History of American Criminal Theory: Culture and Doctrine from Blackstone to the Model Penal Code,” 6 Buffalo Criminal Law Review 691 (2003).

Bruce P. Smith

is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law and author, most recently, of “The Presumption of Guilt and the English Law of Theft, 1750-1850,” which was the subject of a scholarly forum in Law & History Review 23:1 (2005).

Wendie Schneider

is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law and author, most recently, of “Perjurious Albion: Perjury Prosecutions and the Victorian Trial,” in Law & History 343 (Andrew Lewis & Michael Lobban eds., 2004), and “Secrets and Lies: The Queen’s Proctor and Judicial Investigation of Party-Controlled Narratives,” 27 Law & Social Inquiry 449 (2002).

Mariana Valverde

is Professor at the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, and author, most recently, of Law’s Dream of a Common Knowledge (2003) and Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (1998).

Martin Wiener

holds the Mary Gibbs Jones Chair in History at Rice University and is author, most recently of Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England(2004) and Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830-1914 (1990).

Registration

Faculty, law and graduate students are welcome to attend. There will be no fee for this colloquium; however, space is limited so registration is recommended. Please e-mail your name and affiliation to Ellen Kausner, Events Coordinator, at the Baldy Center at ekausner@buffalo.edu.

Workshop Organizers

Contact Markus Dubber at dubber@buffalo.edu for information or with any questions about the substance of the colloquium. For questions about logistics, including travel, accommodation, or local transportation contact Ellen Kausner in the Baldy Center at ekausner@buffalo.edu .

Driving Directions & Parking

Driving directions and information about parking on UB's North Campus can be found here.

Baldy Center For Law & Social Policy
511 O'Brian Hall, Univerity at Buffalo Law School
PO Box 601100, Buffalo, NY 14260 716.645.2102

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