Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in American Legal Thought

Thomas Andrew Green is the John P. Dawson Collegiate Professor of Law emeritus and Professor of History emeritus at the University of Michigan. He served as editor or coeditor of Studies in Legal History, the book series of the American Society for Legal History, from 1986 to 2011. Green has also served as president of the American Society for Legal History, has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. One of his previous publications, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200–1800 (1985), and the present volume together form the framework of his current project, a study of the relationship between ideas about the jury and ideas about criminal responsibility in the English and American past. That project will complete Green's work on two aspects of freedom in Anglo-American criminal justice history: political liberty and free will.

Introduction; Part I. Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in the Age of Pound: 1. The fin de siècle: Speranza; 2. The Progressive Era: Pound; 3. Pound eclipsed?: the conversation of the mid to late 1920s; Part II. Conventional Morality and the Rule of Law: Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in the Forgotten Years, 1930–60: 4. Scientific positivism, utilitarianism, and the wages of conventional morality, 1930–7; 5. Entr'acte: intimations of freedom, 1937–53; 6. Durham v. US, the moral context of the law, and reinterpretations of the Progressive inheritance, 1954–8; Part III. Freedom, Criminal Responsibility, and Retributivism in Late Twentieth-Century Legal Thought: 7. The foundations of neo-retributivism, 1957–76; 8. Rethinking the freedom question, 1978–94; 9. Competing perspectives at the close of the twentieth century; Conclusion.