Nicola Lacey

Nicola Lacey’s A Life of H. L. A. Hart has the most coherent and thoughtfully articulated purpose of all the biographies in my stack. Lacey aims, she says in her introduction, to write an “intellectual history” of Hart, who is often considered the 20th Century’s most important legal philosopher, using “only the personal material which sheds light on his ideas and the course of his career.” But for a man like Hart, the personal and the intellectual are ineluctably intertwined, and Lacey shows that Hart’s personal life and family history to some extent account for the dominant themes in his philosophy. Hart was drawn to consider the individual’s responsibility both in and apart from society in his work by a deep rooted sense of himself as an outsider – despite the fact that he was, to all appearances, the consummate insider. The contrasts between external success and internal anxieties, Lacey says, “constituted the dynamic tensions which shaped almost all Hart’s work and relationships.” Her attempt to account for the origin and repercussions of these tensions provides the compelling question which drives the narrative. The extent to which she balances Hart’s public and private life without over-weighting either is one of the many admirable things about this book. Some others are the quality of the prose, the fine detail in which even minor characters are depicted, the way in which even quite abstruse areas of jurisprudence are succinctly rendered accessible to the lay person. Her depiction of the complexity and intimacy of Hart’s fifty year marriage is helped by the eloquent articulacy of Hart’s journals, and his correspondence with his wife Jenifer. This biography is intelligent, sensitive, scrupulously researched; I am recommending it for these reasons, and also because of the way in which all of its elements work together to create a unified narrative whole, while still allowing it to end as the author hoped it would in her introduction, “on a note which does justice to [Hart’s] achievements without obscuring his complexities.”… (mais)

Professor David Downes has chosen to discuss Nicola Lacey’s The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject -Crime and Punishment, saying that:



“…In the first-past-the-post adversarial elections in neo-liberal societies, crime control has become a competitive arms race with electoral implications; in the co-ordinated market economies like Germany and the Nordic countries criminal justice policies are shielded in key respects from partisan politics…

Lacey finds grounds for cautious optimism in the extent to which these countries have maintained penal moderation in the teeth of strong pressures to ‘govern through crime’ and strong welfare states in the face of pressures to privatise and marketise health, education and social services more generally..…”



The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/david-downes… (mais)