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This conference is designed to promote a conversation among leading scholars, with different but complementary expertise, on the place of Beccaria in the development of modern criminal law and how his ideas have (or have not) travelled into our present.
It will be the first major conference on Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments and its contributions to modern and contemporary debates that has ever been organized in Anglo-American academia. It will bring together political and legal historians, historians of political thought and ideas, political and legal theorists, philosophers, legal scholars and practitioners to dissect Beccaria’s arguments and their echo (or lack thereof) in the practice of contemporary criminal law through the prism of three main forms of punishment: torture; death penalty; incarceration.
Organizers:
David Ragazzoni (Columbia University, Political Science)
Bernard E. Harcourt (Columbia University Law School/Political Science)
Sponsors:
Columbia Law School;
Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (a joint project of the Columbia Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Columbia Law School)
