NEWARK, Del. — Sep. 26, 2016 — The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Dr. Patrick Tomlin (University of Reading) has been awarded the 2017 Berger Memorial Prize for his article, “Retributivists! The Harm Principle Is Not For You!”
The Berger Memorial Prize was established by the APA in memory of Professor Fred Berger of the University of California at Davis. The prize was made possible by gifts to the APA from Professor Berger’s friends, relatives, and colleagues following his untimely death in 1986. The prize is awarded to an outstanding published article in philosophy of law by a member of the association.
Tomlin will be awarded $500; in addition, a symposium in his honor will be held at the 2017 APA Pacific Division meeting in Seattle, WA.
Tomlin is an associate professor in political philosophy at the University of Reading. He received his D.Phil from Balliol College. Tomlin is interested in a variety of questions within political, legal, and moral philosophy. His published work has focused on distributive justice and fairness, crime and punishment, children and procreation, and moral uncertainty. Tomlin is currently working on topics within punishment theory, just war theory, and the permissibility of aggregation. With his colleague Robert Jubb, he is editing the fourth edition of OUP’s Issues in Political Theory.
The selection committee commented that Tomlin’s “Retributivists! The Harm Principle Is Not For You!” is a rigorously and elegantly argued piece that challenges widely held assumptions among legal theorists. His arguments are original and imaginative, and have important consequences for future theorizing about criminalization and the justification of punishment more generally.
