Contenu du sommaire : Peines prononcées, peines appliquées

Contrary to the current discourse which, often, gives a mere contemporary explanation of the sentence, a historical analysis of the latter can be carried out, with the same relevance. Depending on the various levels of state control on society across time, the meaning given to the sentence has varied, thus preventing any resistance to change. That's why some sentences, like imprisonment, experience a movement of flow and ebb, while other sentences, like the alternatives to imprisonment, still unheard of yesterday, are very popular today.

Currently, the sentence is certainly going through a huge crisis. Indeed, the idea of punishment, which is an integral part of the very notion of sentencing, varies according to the contingencies of crime policies without any real guidelines clearly appearing. Obviously, the sentence will manage to overcome this crisis only if the authorities get down to precisely defining the role they wish to give to prisons in the 21th century.

A decade was sufficient to change the French landscape of sentences enforcement in a significant way. One cannot deny that Law was introduced into prison through the process of legal framing of sentences, thus drawing up a body of rules on the form and on the substance. Yet, one should wonder if too much law has not ended up making Law waver. Indeed, the numerous reforms have made the laudable intention to judiciarize sentences enforcement, as intended by law-makers on June 15th, 2000, complex to the extreme.

Beside the numerous législative évolutions which have conferred a theoretical «légal» meaning to the sentence, the latter also finds its practicai sensé in its carrying out. Indeed, the sentence, particuiarly that which deprives someone of their liberty for life, is not experienced in the same way by ail convicted prisoners, Thus, we have learnt from expérience that while some sentences contribute to construd, or reconstruct, the person who is carrying it out, in other cases the sentence has no hold on the convicted prisoner, who simply wanders in the prison world.

French Law has a strong tendency to the emancipation - both substantial and procedural - of the « sentence law », the foundations of this law are still arcane, as « the meaning of the sentence » remains elusive. This is all the more obvious as the knowledge acquired in the past is gradually collapsing, as a result of unprecedented porosity as regards the roles of the various authorities intervening on the sentence, of the very opaque nature of jurisdictionalized sentences, and finally of a high spatial and temporal distortion of the sentence.

In the last centuries of the Middle Âges, criminal litigations were frequently settled by way of transaction, arbitration or mediation. Far from representing an archaic form of private justice, these ways of solving conflicts enabled, on the contrary, public criminal law to be set up, thus promoting the authorities' take-over of criminal disputes. However, at the end of the medieval era, the gradual strengthening of political structures was to lead to the rejection of pacifying mechanisms to the benefit of public sentencing only.

The contribution of psychoanalysis to the prison sphere is to place the self and its uniqueness at the heart of its study. Thus the prisoner has access to a space for expression where he can use his resources to reconstruct his life story and "confront himself to the part of himself which is still unknown to him". This article was written by a psychoanalyst and psychologist who works in an Intensive care unit catering for convicted patients. It is a discussion on expertise and criminal legislation, but also on a practice for which the notion of responsibility, however unstable it may be, is central.

Is it necessary to liberalize surrogacy in France ? This complex question is a part of big current questioning in public ethics. Thus it is necessary all the more to try to draw up a map of the arguments of the partisans as the opponents before trying to plead here in favour of a liberalization matched by a minimal but essential legal limitation.

The riots of November 2005 were a chance to shed light on the deep antagonisms which characterize contemporary French society and constitute the starting points of underlying forms of discrimination which French Law however sends up to the highest levels of the hierarchy of norms. Therefore, the fight against discrimination has become a major legal concern today, and the lawyer should not stand apart from this evolution and should, much to the contrary, take it into account in order to become one of its major agents.

How can we interpret Measure for Measure by Shakespeare, which is such an abounding and baroque work, and both a comedy and a tragedy ? Is it a fable on a manipulative power embodied by a mysterious duke who disappears from the stage of power, to pull strings all the better ? Is it a poem on motley genres and on sham ? François Ost considers it to be a lesson on practical wisdom, which stands at the junction between the letter and the law : « deprived of any common sense, humanity or equity the mechanical enforcement of the law can only lead to dead ends ».