Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Common Law

Columbia Law School

Series

UCLA Law Review

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

How Law Can Be Determinate, Kent Greenawalt Jan 1990

How Law Can Be Determinate, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article, part of a longer study, considers one problem about the objectivity of law. The problem is whether the law as it exists provides determinate answers to many legal questions for judges, other officials, and citizens. I emphasize the word many. This Article does not focus on "hard cases" and then ask whether single correct answers for them exist. It does not inquire whether in some complicated sense all legal questions have determinate answers. This is a treatment of easy legal questions. To most lawyers, it may seem self-evident that many legal questions do have determinate answers; and that …


The Right Deed For The Wrong Reason: A Reply To Mr. Robinson, George P. Fletcher Jan 1975

The Right Deed For The Wrong Reason: A Reply To Mr. Robinson, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

So far as there is a school of criminal theory in the United States, it is a school devoted to sifting and celebrating the purposes of the criminal law. Discussions in the literature are dominated by endless recitals of the deterrent, rehabilitative and retributive functions of criminal sanctions. The orthodox view is that all of these purposes are relevant and that any proposed rule of criminal law must be measured by its tendency to further one or all of these goals. If the issue is punishing negligence, for example, the standard mode of analysis is to ask whether punishing negligent …