EBOOK Punishment and Freedom

This book sets out a new understanding of the penal law of a liberal legal order.          The prevalent view today is that the penal law is best understood from the        standpoint of a moral theory concerning when it is fair to blame and censure an        individual character for engaging in proscribed conduct. By contrast, this book        argues that the penal law is best understood by a political and constitutional        theory about when it is permissible for the state to restrain and confine a free        agent.The book's thesis is that penal action by public officials is permissible        force rather than wrongful violence only if it could be accepted by the agent as        being consistent with its freedom. There are, however, different conceptions of        freedom, and each informs a theoretical paradigm of penal justicegenerating        distinctive constraints on state coercion. Although this plurality of paradigms        creates an appearance of fragmentation and contradiction in the law, the author        argues that the penal law forms a complex whole uniting the constraints on        punishment flowing from each paradigm.