The Rights of the Sovereign: Criminal Law as Public Law Event
- Time:
- 13:00
- Date:
- 2024-11-27 13:00:00
- Venue:
- 4/4003 (Law School Moot Room)
Event details
Professor Peter Ramsay (School of Law, LSE): ‘The Rights of the Sovereign: Criminal Law as Public Law’ Wed 27th Nov 2024, 1pm, 4/4003 (Law School Moot Room, with lunch from 12.30pm)
Speaker:Â Professor Peter Ramsay (School of Law, LSE)
Abstract: In this paper I outline a concept of the criminal law as public law. I analyse the elements of Glanville Williams’s formal definition of criminal law to identify the generic content of the substantive criminal law. This analysis demonstrates that English criminal law is comprised of rights of sovereignty, rights on which the sovereign stakes the political authority of the state. I integrate this account of criminal law with Martin Loughlin’s ‘political jurisprudence’ of public law. I argue that this social-scientific concept provides a superior explanatory account of criminal law to that offered by moral philosophical theories; and that it reveals an immanent standard of normative critique arising from the law’s own essence, as opposed to one imposed by external moral or political theories.
The open access paper for the talk, Professor Peter Ramsay's Rights of the Sovereign: Criminal Law as Public Law , can be found online .