Nicola Lacey
Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory
Nicola Lacey holds a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College. She moved to Oxford in October 2010, having held a chair in Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the London School of Economics since 1998. Before that, she was Professor of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London (1995 to 1997); Fellow and Tutor in Law at New College and CUF Lecturer at Oxford (1984 to 1995); and Lecturer in Laws at University College, London (1981 to 1984). She has held visiting appointments at the Humboldt University in Berlin, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, New York University, Yale and Harvard. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College and of University College, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
In December 2011 she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern: http://www.diesacademicus.unibe.ch/content/diesacademicus2011/preise/index_ger.html
Nicola's research is in criminal law and criminal justice, with a particular focus on comparative and historical scholarship. Over the last few years, she has been working on the development of ideas of criminal responsibility in England since the 18th Century, and on the comparative political economy of punishment. Her next project will be a comparative study combining analysis of penal policies with analysis of practices of legal responsibility-attribution in selected areas of criminalisation, framing these issues within a broad comparative political economy of crime and control. Nicola also has research interests in legal and social theory, in feminist analysis of law, in law and literature, and in biography.
Publications
Showing five recent publications sorted by year, then title [change this]
2012
N Lacey and L H Zedner, 'Legal Constructions of Crime' in M Maguire, R Morgan, and R Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (5th edn) (Oxford University Press 2012)
N Lacey, 'Political Systems and Criminal Justice: The Prisoners\' Dilemma After the Coalition ' (2012) Current Legal Problems
N Lacey, 'Punishment in the Perspective of Comparative Political Economy' (2012) 44 Kriminologische Journal 9-31 9
N Lacey, '‘Punishment, (Neo)Liberalism and Social Democracy’, in (eds.)(Sage Publishing 2012) pp. 260-280' in Jonathan Simon and Richard Sparks (eds), The Sage Handbook of Punishment and Society (Sage Publishing 2012) [...]
In this essay, I address recent attempts to understand the relevance of broadly political forces and institutions in shaping the practice and the social meaning of punishment. I focus on an argument about the relevance of the political which has been especially influential in the punishment and society field during the last decade. This is the argument that political systems can usefully be characterised as broadly liberal or neoliberal, or as social democratic: and that the decline or attenuation of social democracy, and the concomitant rise of (neo)liberalism has been associated with an intensification of penality. I call this the ‘neoliberal penality thesis’ I set out what I take to be the key arguments for that thesis, before presenting a critical analysis of the utility of such a broad conceptualisation of political systems.
N Lacey, '‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Law’' (2012) Rivista di filosofia del diritto 91
Interests
Research: Criminal law; criminal justice; legal, social and political theory; biography; law, history and literature.
