Law I / What Punishment Is For
Practice question · Estimate

In what year did Beccaria publish On Crimes and Punishments, the founding text of the modern critique of punishment?

Estimate on a scale from 1700 to 1850.

Hints
  1. Two decades before the American Revolution and a quarter-century before the French.
  2. The 1760s.
Show the answer

1764 (answers within ±5 count)

Why

1764. The book is where the modern agenda is set: penalties fixed in advance by statute, proportionate to the harm, applied equally, public, prompt, and no more severe than necessary. Almost every limit in Lessons 3 and 4 is a constitutional descendant of an argument first made popular there.

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