The Boundaries of Blame: Towards a Universal Partial Defence for the Criminal Law

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The Boundaries of Blame: Towards a Universal Partial Defence for the Criminal Law

By Louise Kennefick
Cambridge University Press September 2025

Specifications

ISBN-13
9781009386104
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication
September 2025
Format
Hardback
Jurisdiction
U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

How can our criminal law retain legitimacy in an era of growing awareness about the complexities of human vulnerability and the far-reaching harm of punitive attitudes? The Boundaries of Blame makes a fresh contribution to the evolving scholarship on the relationship between criminal responsibility and social justice. It challenges the constricted view of personhood underpinning doctrines of responsibility, encouraging new conversations about longstanding questions on the role of circumstances like deprivation and trauma in excusing wrongdoing. Testing entrenched boundaries can provoke resistance, but the book argues that pushing past these limits is essential to fostering a more just framework of state blame in our present time and place. To achieve this objective, Kennefick proposes a bold yet pragmatic response in the form of a Universal Partial Defence, grounded in the Real Person Approach - a blueprint that offers a practical and humane pathway towards a fairer measure of criminal accountability.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I. Purpose:
1. Activating the criminal law – establishing the duty to advance social justice

Part II. Paradigm and Principle:
2. The real person approach – recognising vulnerability at culpability evaluation
3. Proportionality – recalibrating the desert calculus
4. Parsimony – offsetting misrecognition at culpability evaluation

Part III. Partial Excuse (Practice, Doctrine, and Theory):
5. Universality – understanding and expanding the bounds of partial excuse
6. Diminished responsibility – exploring the template for the UPD
7. Bounded causal theory – rethinking the rationale of partial excuse


Part IV. Proposal:
8. The universal partial defence – outlining a blueprint for reform
Summary of key contributions
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