RELIGION AND SOCIETY

Religion and Society ~ 418 ~ and change is one of the most urgent needs of law today, (The Growth of Law). As Roscoe Pound puts it in his Interpretation of Legal History (p. 1), the law should be stable, but not rigid, and there has to be a balance between the two forces. Philosophers may have made mammoth efforts to achieve this balance, by reconciling the dual necessities of stability and flexibility, but recent history has shown what lopsidedness can be the result. The long established idea that punishment should be inflicted, not only to deter the offender from committing further criminal acts, but to discourage others with similar propensities, was one of the most time-honored and hallowed traditions, and its being tampered with has yielded highly dubious results. The first notable person who advocated mitigation of the punishment of criminals was Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), an Italian expert in criminology. A great deal of research has subsequently been carried out in this field, the upshot being that many experts have come round to the view that the committing of a crime is not an “intentional event”, and that the underlying causes must be looked for biological