Highlights
CLT Seminar: The Lisbon Way: An Alternative View on the Alexy-Ratti Debate
The recent Alexy-Ratti debate is of significant theoretical importance not only because of its challenging exchange of arguments, but also because of the subject matter it addresses. The debate is focused on various legal matters, such as proportionality, balancing, or conflicts of norms, which are now crucial in the activity of constitutional courts.
Practices of punishment both in the private and public sphere exhibit excesses that have been the subject of much concern. Recent arguments that point to punitive excesses and call for restraint have focused on defects that undermine the grounds of punishing, including failures of proportionality and epistemic worries about punishment’s appropriateness, as well as worries about degradingness, cruelty, and the absence of standing to punish. In her presentation, Dr Leora Katz looks to the law to find traces of an ethic of second chances in existing doctrine and theory, and to develop further mechanisms which might be expanded to make more room for the extension of second chances in criminal law.
Professor Andrew Halpin's paper looked at the conundrum faced when we seek a fuller understanding of individual liberty. The evident advantages of a single individual possessing liberty cannot be simply transferred to a greater number of beneficiaries, and the conclusion that in order to extend the advantages of individual liberty to all, something other than liberty is required.
