Professor Antje du Bois-Pedain

Professor Antje du Bois-Pedain is Professor of Criminal Law and Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Deputy Director of the Centre for Penal Theory and Ethics at the Institute of Criminology, and a Fellow of Magdalene College.

In the Faculty of Law, Professor du Bois-Pedain lectures Criminal Law and teaches a seminar course on Select Issues in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. She also runs the Criminal Jurisprudence and Philosophy group for staff and research students across Law and Criminology who work on ethical or theoretical aspects of criminal law and criminal justice.  

Professor du Bois-Pedain outlines her research agenda as follows:

“One major strand of my work addresses the philosophical foundations of state punishment and their significance for the application and reform of criminal law. Moving beyond standard retributivist or utilitarian punishment theories, I argue that legitimate state punishment sets reasonable terms for an offender’s continuing relations with the polity in view of his crime. This allows me to incorporate punishment’s rehabilitative orientation into a rights-based understanding of the offender’s relationship to the state, and to provide an innovative theoretical framework for resolving practical questions in the context of sentencing. The second strand of my work is in criminal law theory and doctrine, often with a comparative or transnational dimension. Here I advance novel understandings of fundamental concepts (such as participation in crime) which advance both the theoretical understanding and the practice of the law. I also publish on questions of transitional justice where my 2007 monograph ‘Transitional Amnesty in South Africa’ is considered a classic in the field.”

Professor du Bois-Pedain is a member of the AHRC's Peer Review College and a frequest assessor of research funding applications and of scholarly work for international publishers.

Visit Professor du Bois-Pedain's SSRN page (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1229319) for some of her papers including forthcoming work not yet listed in the list of publications below.