Librería Portfolio

Sheds new light on the legitimacy crisis of contemporary criminal law in the ´dual penal state´
Explores the deep historical roots of the ´penal paradox´ of state punishment in liberal polities
Employs a systemic comparative approach focused on the US and Germany as paradigmatic common-law and civil-law countries



The Dual Penal State addresses one of today´s most pressing social and political issues: the rampant, at best haphazard, and ever-expanding use of penal power by states ostensibly committed to the enlightenment-based legal-political project of Western liberal democracy. Penal regimes in these states operate in a wide field of ill-considered and barely constrained violence where radical and prolonged interference with citizens, upon whose autonomy the legitimacy of state power supposedly rests, has been utterly normalized. At its heart, the crisis of modern penality is a crisis of the liberal project itself and the penal paradox is the sharpest formulation of the general paradox of power in a liberal state: the legitimacy of state sovereignty in the name of personal autonomy.

To capture the depth and range of the crisis of contemporary penality in ostensibly liberal states the book adopts a fresh approach. It uses historical and comparative analysis to reveal the fundamental distinction between two conceptions of penal power - penal law and penal police - that runs through Western legal-political history: one rooted in autonomy, equality, and interpersonal respect, and the other in heteronomy, hierarchy, and patriarchal power. This dual penal state analysis illuminates how the law/police distinction manifests itself in various penal systems, from the American war on crime to the ahistorical methods of German criminal law science.



Table of Contents
Introduction: The Crisis of the Modern Penal State
PART I CRIMINAL LAW SCIENCE AND ITS DIVERSIONS
1:Engaging Scholarship: Criminal Law and the Legitimation of Penal Power
2:The Rhetoric of Criminal Law: Sloganism and Other Coping Mechanisms
PART II THE DUAL PENAL STATE: TOWARD A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CRIMINAL LAW
3:Law and Police as Modes of Governance
4:Penal Law and Penal Police in the Dual Penal State
PART III AMERICAN PENALITY BETWEEN LAW AND POLICE: A CRITICAL GENEALOGY
5:America´s Internal Penal Exceptionalism
6:Thomas Jefferson´s Virginia Criminal Law Bill
7:The Model Penal Code and the War on Crime