This article examines the doctrine of infanticide in relation to the norms and practices of criminal responsibility. It adopts an historicized approach to the law, which reveals that the legal proscription of child killing by mothers began as an instance of the principles of criminal liability that have been labelled ‘manifest criminality’. With changes in the social meanings accorded to women who kill their children in the 18th and 19th centuries, however, the law of infanticide developed into an instance of (...) what I call ‘manifest madness’, which is an analysis of the way that ‘madness’ is constructed in and through criminal law practices. According to this analysis, a particular social type, the infanticidal woman, has come to determine the legal issue of the defendant’s criminal responsibility, and the act of infanticide has become an instantiation of abnormality for criminal law purposes. In the absence of an expert medical consensus, the ‘strange’ doctrine of infanticide is sustained in the current era by a lay or non-expert knowledge about the interrelation of gender, childbirth and madness, which underpins legal evaluation of infanticidal women and their acts. (shrink)

Criminal responsibility is now central to criminal law, but it is in need of re-examination. In the context of Australian criminal laws, Self, Others and the State reassesses the general assumptions made about the rise to prominence of criminal responsibility in the period since around the turn of the twentieth century. It reconsiders the role of criminal responsibility in criminal law, arguing that criminal responsibility is significant because it organises key sets of relations - between self, others and the state (...) - as relations of responsibility. Detailed studies of decisive moments and developments since the turn of the twentieth century, and original explorations of relations of responsibility, expose the complexity and dynamism of criminal responsibility and reveal that it is the means by which matters of subjectivity, relationality and power make themselves felt in the criminal law. (shrink)

On one level, the focus of The Limits of Criminal Law is captured by its title—the book is concerned with the legitimate boundaries of the criminal law. Lauterwein sets out different approaches to this topic in the German and Australian legal contexts. The book does not formally adopt a comparative methodology, but rather presents ‘an analysis using contextual and comparative elements’ (p. 45). He concentrates on analysing discussion of the limits of the criminal law in Australia, using the German legal (...) theoretical approach as a counterpoint. But, on another level, the book is concerned with the features of criminal legal scholarship in these two national contexts and the influence of this scholarship (in the author’s words, ‘legal theorizing’) on the criminal law in their respective traditions. As a result, The Limits of the Criminal Law addresses both the question ‘what sorts of behaviour may the state legitimately make criminal?’ (a question that is expressly posed by the author) an .. (shrink)