News

Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen have won the Howard Journal Best article Prize 2022 for their article titled: ‘Feeling the absence of justice: Notes on our pathological reliance on punitive justice’.

This article critically examines our relationship with justice in contemporary Western liberal settings, with a particular focus on why our pursuit of justice is intimately entangled with punitive logics. It starts by arguing that we have a predominantly pathological approach to justice, in the sense that it follows a logic that is akin to that displayed in contemporary sensibilities regarding bodily pain. We deploy Drew Leder’s concept of ‘dys-appearance’ to discuss how, in Western liberal societies, justice is primarily experienced negatively as a phenomenon; that is, we mainly become conscious of justice through the painful and episodic experience of injustice. We then explore this phenomenological quality of justice which, we argue, is linked to how the pursuit of justice in these settings predominantly takes a hostile, punitive aspect. The article concludes by exploring how this punitive impulse can be resisted, through what we term a ‘lived sense of justice’.

You can read the article hereLink opens in a new window.

The project titled ‘The Vulnerable State: Appraising the Ambivalent Economies of State Power’ explores the ambivalent and shifting governance of socially marginalised groups in the criminal and administrative justice domains. It hypothesises that the state’s treatment of these groups produces a dissonance between objectives of care and control, which reveals profound dilemmas in the exercise of state power in a globalised, unequal world. It empirically examines these moral and emotional dilemmas through the everyday work of frontline officers.

Methodologically, it reconceptualises the study of the state, from the bottom up. Conceptually, it advances a new theory of the state which places moral sentiments and emotions at the heart of its analysis.

It will assess the significance of acknowledging anew a humane side of the state, the resulting contradictions experienced by those who embody state authority on the ground, and the critical potential of humanitarianism for resisting punitiveness from within.

Drawing on a range of methodologies, the project will study the moral and affective economies of state power in two key institutions (criminal and administrative justice) in the governance of social marginality at the macrosocial level (through the analysis of law and policy, operational training and visual material) and microsocial level (through the analysis of institutional decision-making and practices, and individual perceptions and experiences).

The project is made of five distinct yet interconnected subprojects tracing laws and policies, and documenting the work of a range of institutional actors and agencies (the police, the prison, the immigration court, and asylum case-work and support).

Based at Warwick CJC, the research team will be formed by Aliverti, Carvalho and Chamberlen, two PhD students and a research assistant. It starts in October 2022 for four years.

The University of Warwick School of Law has successfully sponsored a Fernandes Fellowship devoted to academics in Ukraine. Dr Maryna Utkina is now at Warwick and will be with us until the end of this calendar year.

Dr Utkina is a Senior Lecturer in the Criminal Law and Procedure Department at Sumy State University. Her research is on financial regulation and criminal law enforcement of illicit proceeds from organised crime -including terrorism, money laundering and corruption. A brief explanation is below:

In my work I define the place of financial intelligence (monitoring) in the system of combating money laundering and compare foreign financial intelligence units. It serves as one of the most sovereign remedies in the system of counteracting money laundering to minimize and effectively combat organized criminality and money laundering. The high level of development of the shadow economy, corruption, ineffectiveness of regulatory and legal support, as well as duplication of functions of individual authorities have become prerequisites for the financial monitoring system formation.

The main issues I would like to research here:

- a comparative analysis of theoretic and legal framework: to compare notions or definitions of financial intelligence (monitoring); acts and codes which regulate this question;

- compare financial intelligence duties: the system of such authorities and their duties;

- research in general this activity, its levels, main points and the process at all;

- research financial intelligence in the system of corruption prevention: best practices and others.

She is based at the IAS and can be contactable at: m.utkina@yur.sumdu.edu.ua. She is very keen on getting to know colleagues while she is here.

|The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and the Crime and Society Program, Universidad Nacional del Litoral will be hosting an international conference on the Global Travels of Knowledge on the Criminal Question (1850/1950) on September 8-9 2022.

The conference will be hybrid and there will be simultaneous translation allowing for either English or Spanish presentations.

Paper proposals Paper proposals can be written in Spanish or English and must have a maximum length of two pages, including the title, abstract and basic academic data of the author(s) – place of work, research project in which it is inscribed, undergraduate and postgraduate training, etc.

The deadline for submitting these proposals will be May 15, 2022 and they must be sent to the email: delitoysociedad@unl.edu.ar.

The acceptance of these proposals will be communicated before May 31, 2022.

Final papers may not exceed 8000 words, including notes and references. They must be sent to the same email address by August 1, 2022 .

More details and the full call for papers can be found at this link.