Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen's forthcoming publication on the motivation to punish in Punishment and Society is now available online at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1462474517699814

The argument advanced in this paper is that the motivation to punish relies on punishment producing a kind of solidarity that allows individuals to pursue emotional release together with a sense of belonging, without having to question or address why it is that they felt alienated and insecure in the first place. This raises the possibility that the reason why we believe punishment to be useful, and why we are motivated to punish, is because we derive pleasure from the utility of punishment. Simply stated, punishment pleases. It then analyses the relationship between punishment and solidarity to investigate why and how punishment pleases. We argue that the pleasure of punishment is directly linked to the specific kind of solidarity that punishment produces, which we call hostile solidarity. The paper explores the links between punishment and identity in order to examine the allure of hostile solidarity and then draws implications from this perspective and sets out an agenda for future research.

Prof Vanessa Munro's forthcoming publication on sexual offences law and policy in Social and Legal Studies is now available to read online at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0964663916682584

Although the consent threshold remains fundamental to the demarcation of acceptable from unacceptable forms of behaviour within contemporary sexual offences law and policy, there has clearly been a shift in recent years in England and Wales towards more ‘contextual’ understandings and interpretations thereof. In many respects, this is a welcome development, which has the potential to at least partially redress the problematic assumption of a disembodied, individualistic and self-determining chooser, which critics maintain has underpinned many conventional (liberal) accounts of autonomy. At the same time, however, there are risks associated with this turn to context that require vigilance. More specifically, this shift has opened the door to greater reliance upon the often closely associated concepts of vulnerability and exploitation. In this article, I will argue that, while these concepts can be valuable in highlighting and challenging the constraining conditions under which (sexual) choices may be made, they can also be deployed in the service of moral and political interventions that entrench precariousness in the name of protection and/or increase surveillance in pursuit of responsibilization. To assess their impact, therefore, it is necessary to explore the concrete implications of this turn for those most immediately involved. In the following discussion, I will do so first by highlighting some of its perhaps unintended, but certainly undesirable, effects in the specific contexts of sexual assault and sex work policy. Having done so, I will move on to explore what we might learn more broadly from this experience about the benefits, blind spots and backfire in using vulnerability as a lens and lever for the pursuit of social justice.

The Criminalization series arose from an interdisciplinary investigation into criminalization, focussing on the principles that might guide decisions about what kinds of conduct should be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. Developing a normative theory of criminalization, the series tackles the key questions at the heart of the issue: what principles and goals should guide legislators in deciding what to criminalize? How should criminal wrongs be classified and differentiated? How should law enforcement officials apply the law's specifications of offences?

In the sixth volume in the series, Victor Tadros offers a philosophical investigation of the relationship between moral wrongdoing and criminalization. Considering they justification of punishment, the nature of harm, the importance of autonomy, inchoate wrongdoing, the role of consent, and the role of the state, the book provides an account of the nature of moral wrong doing, the sources of wrong doing, why wrong doing is the central target of the criminal law, and the ways in which criminalization of non-wrongful conduct might be permissible.

A flyer with a voucher valid until 17 March 2017 is available.

Ana Aliverti has edited a special issue for the New Criminal Law Review on 'Criminal Justice Adjudication in an Age of Migration'.

The articles are united by a shared set of questions about the salience of citizenship in contemporary criminal justice policies and practices. As such, they offer important empirical and theoretical evidence of the shifting global terrain. In particular, the articles in this collection address three distinct, yet interconnected, matters: migration control and state sovereignty, fairness and equality, and politics and policy.

Ana is presenting the articles in more details in a blog post for Border Criminologies.

In this follow-up to Law and the Beautiful Soul, Alan Norrie addresses the split between legal and ethical judgment. Shaped by history, law’s formalism both eschew and requires ethics.

The first essays consider legal form in its practical aspect, and the ethical problems encountered (‘law’s architectonic’). The later essays look at the complex underlying relation between law and ethic (‘law’s constellation’). In Hegel’s philosophy, legal and ethical judgment are brought together in a rational totality. Here, the synthesis remains unachieved, the dialectic systematically ‘broken’.

These essays cover such issues as criminal law’s ‘general part’, homicide reform, self-defence, euthanasia and war guilt. They interrogate legal problems, consider law’s method and its place in the social whole. The analysis of law’s historicity, its formalism and its relation to ethics contributes importantly to central questions in law, legal theory and criminal justice.