Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Institution
Articles 1 - 10 of 10
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Mercy By The Numbers: An Empirical Analysis Of Clemency And Its Structure, Michael Heise
Mercy By The Numbers: An Empirical Analysis Of Clemency And Its Structure, Michael Heise
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Clemency is an extrajudicial measure intended both to enhance fairness in the administration of justice, and allow for the correction of mistakes. Perhaps nowhere are these goals more important than in the death penalty context. The recent increased use of the death penalty and concurrent decline in the number of defendants removed from death row through clemency call for a better and deeper understanding of clemency authority and its application. Questions about whether clemency decisions are consistently and fairly distributed are particularly apt. This study uses 27 years of death penalty and clemency data to explore the influence of defendant …
Does Punishment For 'Culpable Indifference' Simply Punish For 'Bad Character'? Examining The Requisite Connection Between Mens Rea And Actus Reus, Kenneth Simons
Faculty Scholarship
The conventional mental state or culpability categories recognized in the criminal law are purpose, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence. Should the law also recognize as an additional category some version of "culpable indifference"? Yes, according to a number of scholars; and some courts have also recognized this category, especially in the context of depraved heart murder. Culpable indifference can describe a modestly culpable mental state, sufficient for manslaughter liability (or, with respect to a circumstance element, roughly equivalent in seriousness to cognitive recklessness). It can also identify a more aggravated form of culpability, sufficient for murder (or, with respect to a …
Oil And Water: Why Retribution And Repentance Do Not Mix, Sherry F. Colb
Oil And Water: Why Retribution And Repentance Do Not Mix, Sherry F. Colb
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Before And After: Temporal Anomalies In Legal Doctrine, Leo Katz
Before And After: Temporal Anomalies In Legal Doctrine, Leo Katz
All Faculty Scholarship
Legal doctrine exhibits some striking temporal anomalies, previously not much adverted to. Wrongdoing looked at before it has occurred, and after is has occurred, is apt to look very different. I take up the two key components of wrongdoing seriatim, the harm-portion and the misconduct-portion: the "damage" part and the "liability" part. We tend to look at harm in a harm-agnifying way before it has occurred, and in a harm-inimizing way afterwards. We thus tend to think about negligence and the harm it wreaks in seemingly inconsistent ways. I examine and reject some possible explanations of this. Misconduct too looks …
Retribution: The Central Aim Of Punishment, Gerard V. Bradley
Retribution: The Central Aim Of Punishment, Gerard V. Bradley
Journal Articles
When I worked for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in the early 1980s, criminal sentences were consistently and dramatically too lenient. Though those years marked the ebb tide for the rehabilitative ideal of punishment and indeterminate "zip-to-ten" sentences, only career felons and those convicted of the most serious crimes were candidates for the sentences they justly deserved. Hamstrung by apparently silly rules of constitutional etiquette and bureaucratic sclerosis, the police were eclipsed in the mind of the public by the cold-blooded Everyman, bound only by the law of the jungle and some elusive sense of justice. Ultimately, popular demand required …
Restorative Justice And The Jewish Question, Daniel J.H. Greenwood
Restorative Justice And The Jewish Question, Daniel J.H. Greenwood
Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship
While the particular languages of our differing religious traditions do not seem to me to be good bases for a public criminal law, they are useful for considering familiar issues in an unfamiliar light. I therefore offer a reading of a set of unfamiliar texts from the Talmud, one of the foundational texts of the Jewish tradition, to make two basic points about criminal law with some applicability to the restorative justice debate. At the same time, their language and structure should illustrate how disparate our traditions are.
First, criminal law should have a limited, nontranscendental goal. Torah law, like …
Introduction: What Does It Mean To Say That A Remedy Punishes?, Anthony J. Sebok
Introduction: What Does It Mean To Say That A Remedy Punishes?, Anthony J. Sebok
Faculty Articles
No abstract provided.
Nietzsche And Aretaic Legal Theory, Kyron Huigens
Nietzsche And Aretaic Legal Theory, Kyron Huigens
Faculty Articles
No abstract provided.
What Did Punitive Damages Do? Why Misunderstanding The History Of Punitive Damages Matters Today, Anthony J. Sebok
What Did Punitive Damages Do? Why Misunderstanding The History Of Punitive Damages Matters Today, Anthony J. Sebok
Faculty Articles
In 2001 the Supreme Court, in Cooper Industries, Inc. v. Leatherman Tool Group, Inc. suggested that, although modern punitive damages punish, in earlier times they almost exclusively compensated for noneconomic damages that were ignored by a less progressive legal system. This article demonstrates that the historical foundation upon which the Supreme Court bases its argument is groundless. In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries punitive damages served a number of functions, but none of them were to provide the noneconomic damages identified by the court. Instead, as the article shows, the sort of injuries for which punitive damages were once demanded …
Citizenship And Severity: Recent Immigration Reforms And The New Penology, Teresa A. Miller
Citizenship And Severity: Recent Immigration Reforms And The New Penology, Teresa A. Miller
Journal Articles
Over the past twenty years, scholars of criminal law, criminology and criminal punishment have documented a transformation in the practices, objectives, and institutional arrangements underlying a range of criminal justice system functions that are at the heart of penal modernism. In contrast to the preceding eighty years of criminal justice practices that were progressively more modern in their belief in the rationality of the criminal offender and their concern for enhancing civilization through rehabilitative responses to criminality, these scholars note that since the mid-198''0s the relatively settled assumptions about the framework that shaped criminal justice and penal practices for nearly …