These four volumes address the question of the kinds of conduct may the state make criminal without infringing on the moral autonomy of individual citizens.

For most of the century and a half that began roughly with the later works of John Stuart Mill, the most important divide within liberal political thought was that between classical liberalism and welfare liberalism. The questions that were important to the socialist/liberal debate also became important for debates within liberalism: What is the relationship between property and freedom? Between free trade and freedom? Is freedom of commercial activity on a moral par with other sorts of freedom? Is the alleviation (...) of poverty or material need a more important political goal than freedom? How do freedom and equality fit together in a liberal understanding of justice? What degree of state economic planning, or state taxation and expenditure, is compatible with liberal freedom? (shrink)

This article explores the prospects and pitfalls faced by a feminist legal scholar wanting to set up a ‘sexual infidelity’ homicide public engagement project. Following Carol Smart’s suggestion that law is an important site of engagement, counter-discourse and critical feminist interventions, it argues that provocation by infidelity femicide cases are ideal sites for continuing the project of encouraging discursive struggle. The cases cry out for conversion into a critical, pedagogical means of mobilising consciousness about emotional excuses for violence against women.

To be radical about pornography used to mean that one favored less censorship; now it often means that one favors more. That political change reflects a shift in the dominant paradigm of pornography and its putative evils. Until quite recently, most people who believed pornography wrong thought that it offended against decency and propriety and was therefore obscene. That was certainly the view of the law. English judges first created the crime of obscene libel in 1727 on the basis that (...) such expression tended to corrupt the morals of the King's subjects, a thought that inspired most subsequent legislation in the common‐law world. Sometimes the underlying concern really was paternalistic: pornography degrades and corrupts its producers and consumers; the law forces them to become better people. More often, however, it was just moralism of the familiar sorts: the view that a majority of a community is entitled to enforce its moral views on the rest, either because that is democratic or because that is just what it means to be a community. The obscenity paradigm thus had two features. First, it was illiberal: it ranked personal autonomy below realizing the good, enforcing the majority will, or embodying communitarian values. Second, it was gender neutral: to understand the nature of pornography did not require theorizing relations between men and women. On the obscenity paradigm, pornography was a matter of virtue versus vice, majorities versus minorities. (shrink)

In the essay On Liberty , Mill put forward his famous principle that society may only interfere with those actions of an individual which concern others and not with actions which merely concern himself. The validity of this principle depends on there being a distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding actions. But the concept of self-regarding actions has been severely criticised on the ground that all actions affect others in some way and are therefore other-regarding. The notion of self-regarding actions appears (...) to be completely discredited. Very recently, however, there has been some dissatisfaction with the traditional debunking of Mill on this score. Two serious and important attempts to reinterpret the principle were made by Mr J. C. Rees in an article entitled ‘A Re-Reading of Mill on Liberty’, and by Mr Alan Ryan in two brief but extremely useful contributions. My aim is to discuss these reinterpretations of Mill, and on the basis of this, build up what I think is the correct account of Mill's notion of self-regarding actions. (shrink)

Of John Stuart Mill's major commitments, none was more passionately pursued than equality; it marks his writings throughout his life, and serves as a uniting force in his comments on many subjects, especially lawand education. This volume presents, in scholarly form for the first time, writings that reveal his goals and methods in diverse circumstances. They begin with his precocious essay on the law of libel and include his influential Subjection of Women, his major essays on slavery, his Inaugural Address (...) at St Andrews, and his contributionsin the struggle to being Governor Eyre of Jamaica to trial. A variety of shorter essays is also presented: such personal documents as his declaration just before amrriage renouncing all legal rights over his wife, and his and Harriett Taylor's companion pieces on marriage, newly edited from manuscript. Also included is Mill's evidence before parliamentary committees on education and the Contagious Diseases Acts. The appendices include ancillary texts and a bibliographic index listing all works and persons mentioned or quoted in the essays. An analytic index gives easy access to the full range of Mill's ideas in these important essays. (shrink)

Rae Langton here draws together her ground-breaking and contentious work on pornography and objectification. She shows how women come to be objectified -- made subordinate and treated as things -- and she argues for the controversial feminist conclusions that pornography subordinates and silences women, and women have rights against pornography.

Domestic violence discourse challenges cultural acceptance of male violence against women, yet it is often constituted by gendered, racialized, and class-based hierarchies.Transformative efforts have not escaped traces of these hierarchies. Emancipatory ideals guiding 1970s feminist activism have collided with conservative impulses to maintain and strengthen family relationships. Crime control discourse undermines critiques of dominance through its focus on individual men. Domestic violence discourse exemplifies both resistance to and replication of hierarchies of power.

In an important essay Charles Larmore tells us that Kant and Mill sought to justify the principle of political neutrality by appealing to ideals of autonomy and individuality. By remaining neutral with regard to controversial views of the good life, constitutional principles will express, according to them, what ought to be of supreme value throughout the whole of our life.1 On Larmore’s influential reading, Mill defended what we might call first-level neutrality: Millian principles determining justified legal (and, we might add, (...) social) intervention are neutral between competing conceptions of the good life. However, Larmore insists that Millian neutral political principles do not posses second-level neutrality: they do not have a neutral justification. The problem with Mill’s valuebased defense of liberalism,” Larmore insists, is that because the value of individuality is “far from uncontroversial,” 2 Mill’s case liberalism is open to reasonable objection. In contrast Larmore and, of course, John Rawls, seek to develop a “political liberalism” that defends liberal neutrality without appeal to a “general ‘philosophy of man’ or a ‘comprehensive moral ideal’.”3 The justification of liberal principles “must be acceptable by reasonable people having different views of the good life, not just those who share, for example, Mill’s ideal of the person.”4 Liberals, argues Larmore, need “a neutral justification of neutrality.”5.. (shrink)