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The Dual Penal State
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| What's
this
then?
It's an
experiment, a project-in-progress page that, well, traces
the progress of the Dual
Penal State project online. As papers related to the
project appear online (in the usual places, most notably SSRN),
they are integrated into the outline, which functions as
the rug that holds the room together ... if that's
possible while the room is still being assembled (see Coen & Coen 1998);
citation and access information for published versions of
(most of) the (English-language) papers and books is
available here.Will
it be a book?
Yes,
for now (also available in
paperback, and in German
and Spanish).
But who knows what academic publishing will look like a
few years from now? Or next year, for that matter? Papers
(formerly known as "journal articles") have moved online
(as have the "journals"),
so why wouldn't longer works (formerly known as "books")?
"Articles" are being "prepublished" (and "preprinted")
online, so why wouldn't "books"?What's
it about?
For some time,
I've been puzzling over two concepts--"law" and "police."
Let's call them modes of governance. Whatever they're
called, the distinction between law and police seemed to
me to get at some interesting features of how people have
governed, and have thought and talked about governing, for
quite some time: since the days of Ancient Greece or at
least since the Enlightenment, depending on who's
counting. I wrote a book (The
Police Power) to see whether this vague sense of
significance was based on anything resembling historical
evidence; having convinced myself, and some others, that
it was, I then set out--with the help of patient
colleagues and friends--to find a place for the
distinction between law and police in the disciplinary
landscape of contemporary scholarship and, eventually, to
respond to questions like "but what does it do?"
(or its common variant "but what normative work
does it do?") and, more specifically, "why don't you
work this out in a general theory of criminal law?" This
site records my ongoing attempt to address these and
related questions. What's
the point?
There are two
points, really. The obvious point is to lay out a
comprehensive critical analysis of the modern penal state
from the perspectives of law and police. (While I'm not a
big fan of the amorphous and overchewed term "rule of
law," historian Jill Lepore's pithy summary of my take on the distinction
is helpful enough as a starting point: "Under the rule
of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, we
are not.") The less obvious one is to illustrate,
using the state's penal power as an example, a general
approach to legal scholarship, which regards the critical
analysis of law (New Legal Science) as complementing the
critical analysis of police (New Police Science) to
constitute a comprehensive analysis of state power (New
State Science). -- Markus Dubber
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