Books by Nicola Lacey

Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal methodology, this volume investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law.

Criticizes the fundamental liberal philosophical assumptions underlying much of the modern tradition of theorizing about punishment. Instead, this text argues that the social functions of criminal law and punishment are justifiable.

Lacey argues that harsh 'penal populism' is not the inevitable fate of all contemporary democracies. Globalisation has failed to eradicate all the differences between national institutional systems, and it is only through understanding the institutional preconditions for a tolerant criminal justice system that we can think about reforming particular systems.

H L A Hart was the pre-eminent legal philosopher of the twentieth century. This is both an intellectual and a psychological biography, following his life from modest origins as the son of Jewish tailor parents in Yorkshire to worldwide fame as the most influential English-speaking legal theorist of the post-War era.

This book presents a feminist critique of law based on an analysis of the ways in which the very structure or method of modern law is gendered.

A biography that explores the forces that shaped the life of H L A Hart, as one of the greatest legal philosophers. But behind his public success, his Jewish background, ambivalent sexuality, and unconventional marriage, all fuelled his psychological complexity; and allegations of espionage, though immediately quashed, nearly destroyed him.