Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Patricia Faraldo Cabana (Criminal Law)

This lecture offers a comprehensive analysis of the historical development of the penal fine as a sanction from the point of view that the changing meaning of money influences the perceived appropriateness of fines as a punishment for every type of offence, or only certain offences. As will be shown here, a series of associations based on the idea of money, its essence and its capabilities had a profound impact on modern European legal culture. The different perception of the significance of money in contrast to freedom helps to explain the rise of imprisonment in the nineteenth century. The present use of fines to punish less serious crimes and misdemeanours within the criminal law can also be seen as a direct consequence of the development of money and its characteristics of impersonality and interchangeability since the nineteenth century. In the talk the idea will be explored that we need a way to build a nexus between money and freedom to make money sanctions for serious crimes more palatable.