CJS Seminars and VCLG: Matt Matravers
Location:
Teaching Room 01
Old College
Date/time
Wed 19 March 2025
16:00-17:30
The Crime, Justice & Society Seminar Series and the Virtual Criminal Law Group presents
What I Talk About When I Talk About Punishment
Matt Matravers (University of York)
About this event
Philosophers of (legal) punishment tend to talk about punishment, but should we? This paper considers whether the problem of justifying punishment is best approached by talking about other things: perhaps the state, public policy, and/or criminal justice. It goes on to delineate the advantages and disadvantages of differing approaches to theorising about punishment.
About the speaker
Matt is Professor of Law at York Law School, having been at the University of York since 1995 serving as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations. Matt sits on the AHRC Peer Review College, the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Criminal Law and Philosophy. His research focuses on responsibility and blameworthiness in criminal law, and the justifications for punishment. His previous research includes projects on state misconduct and sentence mitigation, the problem of doing penal justice in circumstances of social injustice, and on what the state owes to those whom it has punished.
This is a hybrid event.