The Normative Study of Law: Concepts of Justice in the Criminal System
The American and German criminal systems have grown steadily apart since the Second World War. They have become so different, in such morally significant ways, that they should now be viewed as encoding two distinct conceptions of redressive justice. This project aims to bring those two conceptions of justice to light.
To engage with the law in this way reflects a particular methodological approach to the normative study of law. The typical normative approach to law, at least in the United States, is to ask whether some legal arrangement honors or violates some important principle or contributes to or detracts from some important good; the normativist thus effectively stands in judgment over the law, first developing a normative conception and then applying that normative conception to the law.
This project contributes to another, less prevalent but not unknown way of engaging normatively with the law: a “reconstructive” approach. The notion is that normative ideas are encoded or embedded already in existing social practices, and that one of the objects of philosophical engagement with the world is to uncover these normative ideas. To engage with the German and American criminal systems reconstructively is thus to ask: What are these systems’ implicit beliefs about criminal responsibility? What are their commitments regarding punishment? What, finally, do they take to be a just response to criminal wrongdoing?
The project will be developed over the course of a series of articles. One set of articles aims to specify in detail the reconstructive approach to the normative study of law. A second set engages with the theoretical study of justice, trying to identify the place within such a theory for the kind of redressive concerns at work in a criminal system. The third and last set engages directly with the German and American criminal systems, reading from their practices the redressive conceptions to which they are committed. The work, taken as a whole, should yield a better understanding of both the theory of justice and, empirically, the normative orders we actually occupy.
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People in this project:
- Project director / contact
- Günther, Klaus, Prof. Dr. | Profile
- Project members
- Kleinfeld, Joshua, Research Fellow (former member) | Profile
Publikationen in diesem Projekt:
- Günther, Klaus (2009): Anerkennung, Verantwortung, Gerechtigkeit, in: Rainer Forst (u.a.) (Hrsg.), Sozialphilosophie und Kritik, Frankfurt am Main (Suhrkamp) 2009, S. 269-287.
Details - Günther, Klaus (2009): Die naturalistische Herausforderung des Schuldstrafrechts, in: Stephan Schleim/Tade Matthias Spranger/Henrik Walter (Hg.), Von der Neuroethik zum Neurorecht?, Göttingen (Vandenhoek) 2009, S. 214-242.
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