![handle is hein.journals/jisprud4 and id is 1 raw text is: (2013) 4(1) Jurisprudence 1-19
The Jurisprudence Annual Lecture 2013
Institutionalising Responsibility:
Implications for Jurisprudence
Nicola Lacey*
[A] theory which concerns itself solely with the issue of validation- ... 'Is this law or is
this not law?'-is excessively artificial and does only scant justice to the social actualities
with which it purports to deal.'
It was a particular pleasure to be invited to give the annual Jurisprudence lecture,
given that jurisprudence has played a very important role in my career: not sim-
ply because it has been a research preoccupation, but because the interest I had
in legal theory, broadly understood (and including what I would now think of as
criminal law theory), was the main thing which gave me intellectual motivation
through my law degree.
I read law at UCL, whose pedagogic diet of legal theory was both usual and
unusual. It was unusual, for that period, in its breadth-Michael Freeman ran a
half course during the first year in Sociology of Law; and unusual in the sophistica-
don of its analytical jurisprudence course. More usual was the fact that, particularly
in the jurisprudence course itself, it was very much philosophical jurisprudence,
in particular the analytical jurispnidence of the English-speaking world, which was
the major preoccupation. Kelsen, admittedly, was acknowledged to be an impor-
tant thinker, albeit regarded as unnecessarily impenetrable. But the realists of
various schools were fundamentally wrong-headed; the Marxists and sociologists
were, as Hart might have put it, 'banished to another discipline'; and feminist and
other critical legal theories were at that time nowhere to be seen. The latter, along
* Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford; Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory,
University of Oxford, UK. My warm thanks go to Peter Cane and Lindsay Farmer for comments on
an earlier draft and helpful exchanges about the arguments, and to the audiences at the Annual
jwisprudence Lecture held at LSE, at the University of Bristol, at the Law Schools at Boston College
and Cornell University for their engagement with the lecture's argument.
1 Judith N Shklar, Legalism: Law, Mrals and Political Trials (Harvard University Press, 1964) 223.
DOI: 10.5235/20403313.4.1.1](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jisprud4&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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