The seminal work of Professor Nicola Lacey and Professor Jeremy Horder features in a new publication, Leading Works in Criminal Law (Routledge, 2023). The two publications highlighted in the book are:-
Nicola Lacey, Celia Wells and Dirk Meure, Reconstructing Criminal Law (1990)
"Reconstructing Criminal Law is a leading work in criminal law because of its lasting pedagogical value. The volume’s distinctive construction - placing social context and criminal process alongside doctrinal arrangements - provokes essential questions in criminal law teaching, ones that go to the legitimacy and equality of criminal law. As such, despite the book itself being currently out of date, it can still be read today as a key feminist text, and its potential remains as a means of queering criminal law teaching to offer viewpoints still marginalised in criminal law teaching."
Jeremy Horder, ‘Rethinking Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person’ (1994)
"In ‘Rethinking Non-fatal Offences Against the Person’, Jeremy Horder criticises the Law Commission’s 1993 proposals for reforming the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and instead proposes a series of offences designed to capture the moral essence of the defendant’s wrongdoing. In constructing a morally nominate account of wrongs against the person, Horder’s most serious offences are reserved for defendants who, inter alia, castrate, disable, disfigure, dismember, or render the victim deaf or blind. An early and influential account of fair labelling, the work remains important in that context. However, revisited through the lens of a body of scholarship published in the decades since Horder’s original work, the conceptual and normative foundations upon which his morally nominate account is based is revealed to be more socially and culturally contingent than it claims to be. This insight opens up space for a new legacy for Horder’s piece: as an illustration of the limits of legal moralism, if we are not careful to expose and interrogate our social and cultural starting points; as a reminder of the value of scholarship outside of legal theory and analytic philosophy to help us do just that; and as a starting point for a new discussion of what it might mean to commit an offence against the person."
In another section of the book, Professor Lacey also offers her own appraisal of Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals (1965).