Preventive Justice

Although the reasons and justifications for state punishment have been explored extensively, the scope, limits, and principles of preventive justice have attracted little analysis or critical scrutiny, except in relation to measures to prevent terrorism. Professors Andrew Ashworth and Lucia Zedner of Oxford University are focusing on preventive justice issues as part of a three-year project funded the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project aims to develop a set of principles and values that can provide a framework for all forms of coercive preventive measures.

The Preventive Justice workshop brought together scholars from the United States and abroad to discuss some of the themes of this project.

“There are good reasons to justify the state in authorizing the use of coercion to protect the public from harm,” Ashworth and Zedner said. “But recent years have seen a proliferation of preventive measures that alter the boundaries of criminal liability and blur the historic division between the criminal and civil law. These new measures allow the civil law to be used for criminal law purposes but without the protections normally provided to defendants.”