Professor Andrew Ashworth

Professor Andrew Ashworth

CBE, KC (Hon), LLB, MA, PhD, DCL, DJur (Hon), LLD (Hon), FBA
Law
Emeritus Fellow since 2013

 I held the Vinerian Professorship of English Law for 16 years from 1997 to 2013.  My main teaching subjects were Criminal Law, Sentencing and associated topics in criminal justice. I was one of the founders of a new postgraduate course in criminal justice, the M.Sc. in Criminology, which was based in the Centre for Criminology.  Around the same time the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force, bringing about a reorganization of the teaching of English law and close study of European human rights law. Since my retirement I have not engaged in regular teaching but I have continued my research, focusing on the role and limits of preventive measures, and more recently the role and limits of altruism in the criminal law.

Links
Email: andrew.ashworth@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
Faculty of Law Profile
Research Areas
Research into sentencing, with an emphasis on theoretical issues
Research into coercive measures based on preventive rationales
Research into the role that altruism plays in the justification for criminal laws
Research into the doctrine of necessity in English criminal law

Selected Publications

Principles of Criminal Law

A.Ashworth, Oxford University Press, 1990 

The Criminal Process

A.Ashworth, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Sentencing and Criminal Justice

A.Ashworth, Cambridge University Press, 1992

Positive Obligations in Criminal Law

A.Ashworth, Hart Publishing, 2013

Preventive Justice

A.Ashworth and L. Zedner, Oxford University Press, 2014

Altruism in the Criminal Law

A.Ashworth and J. Pina Rochefort, Hart Publishing, 2025