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Pain As Fact And Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions Of Law, Amanda Pustilnik Oct 2011

Pain As Fact And Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions Of Law, Amanda Pustilnik

Amanda C Pustilnik

Legal statuses, prohibitions, and protections often turn on the presence and degree of physical pain. In legal domains ranging from tort to torture, pain and its degree do important definitional work by delimiting boundaries of lawfulness and of entitlements. The omnipresence of pain in law suggests that the law embodies an intuition about the ontological primacy of pain. Yet, for all the work done by pain as a term in legal texts and practice, it has had a confounding lack of external verifiability. As with other subjective states, we have been able to impute pain’s presence but have not been …


Review Essay: Excuse Theory Through A Liberal Lens, Richard Boldt Sep 2010

Review Essay: Excuse Theory Through A Liberal Lens, Richard Boldt

Richard C. Boldt

This essay reviews Excusing Crime, by Jeremy Horder, Reader in Criminal Law and Tutor in Law at Worcester College, Oxford. It describes Horder’s project, which is to build a complex taxonomy of criminal law excuse practices and to use that account of “why things are as they are” to argue, on the basis of his version of liberal theory, against “the restricted range” of excuses in the UK and elsewhere. By virtue of his appreciation that some, but not all, excuses contain justificatory elements, and given his insistence that pure claims of non-responsibility are not excuses, Horder has defined a …