Holiday Gift List for Your Favorite Criminal Law Theorist

Not long ago, the philosophy of criminal law and punishment was thought to be a bit of a dead end. Happily, that has not been true for at least the last 25 years, and indeed, now the problem might be that there is too much to read in this area.

Oxford University Press continues to exacerbate that problem. Indeed, in just the last few months, I have received the following three volumes, all just recently published:

Retributivism Has a Past: Has It a Future? (Ed. by Michael Tonry)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Criminal Law (edited by Deigh and Dolinko)

Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law (edited by Duff and Green)

These are in addition to the volume that we just celebrated at St. Johns' earlier this month, Mark D. White's edited collection on Retributivism: Essays on Theory and Policy (OUP 2011 also).

I hope to dip into or even immerse myself in these waters over the coming months. I suspect all these volumes will provoke thought and move the discussions forward. But if I'm wrong about that, you'll read about those reactions here :-) In the meantime, I invite OUP to lower the price tags. All of these volumes are priced well above what normal people would be willing to spend on books, making these the preserve of law and philosophy libraries. Alas.