Law Commons^™

Integrating The Access To Justice Movement, Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Last fall, advocates of social change came together at the A2J Summit at Fordham University School of Law and discussed how to galvanize a national access to justice movement - who would it include, and what would or should it attempt to achieve? One important preliminary question we tackled was how such a movement would define "justice," and whether it would apply only to the civil justice system. Although the phrase "access to justice" is not exclusively civil in nature, more often than not it is taken to have that connotation. Lost in the interpretation is an opportunity to engage …

Intuitions Of Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Robert Kurzban

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent work reveals, contrary to wide-spread assumptions, remarkably high levels of agreement about how to rank order, by blameworthiness, wrongs that involve physical harms, takings of property, or deception in exchanges. In The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726) we proposed a new explanation for these unexpectedly high levels of agreement.

Elsewhere in this issue, Professors Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman offer a critique of our views, to which we reply here. Our reply clarifies a number of important issues, such as the interconnected roles that culture, variation, and evolutionary processes play in generating intuitions of punishment.