Punishment and Culture: A Right to Punish? - Hardcover

This volume critically explores the basis and the goal of punishment from the standpoint of the right to punish. The work reviews the main doctrines that have dealt with the theme of punishment from Antiquity to the present, not limiting itself to the legal-philosophical sphere but also analyzing the contributions from other social sciences. It then explores how these are reflected in the sphere of Positive Law.

Maria Jose Falcon y Tella is Professor of Legal Philosophy (from 1991) and Director of the Institute of Human Rights (from 1998) at the Complutense University of Madrid. She is the author of 14 books - on topics such as Analogy and Legal Argumentation (1991), Validity of Law (1994, 1998, 2000), Civil Disobedience (2000, also by Brill Publishers, 2004), General Theory of Law (2001, 2003), Punishment (2005) and Equity (2005)- and many articles in specialized Spanish and other Reviews. Some of her works have been translated into different languages. She spent several periods abroad doing research at the Universities of Bologna, Paris, Brussels, Louvain, Harvard, Berkeley, Cologne, Oxford and Frankfurt, inter alia. She was awarded "The National Prize of Studies in Law" in 1987 and "The Extraordinary Doctoral Thesis Prize" in 1989. Fernando Falcon y Tella is Doctor in Law (2003) and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of the Complutense University of Madrid. He is author of a monograph about Threedimensionalism in Law (2004) - the topic of his Doctoral Thesis - and another on Punishment (2005), and many articles in Spanish and other Reviews. He spent periods researching at the Universities of Paris, Geneva and Oxford. He held a research scholarship awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education for its Research Fellow's Training Scheme.