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Criminal Law Scholarship: Three Illusions, Paul H. Robinson

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The paper criticizes criminal law scholarship for helping to construct and failing to expose analytic structures that falsely claim a higher level of rationality and coherence than current criminal law theory deserves. It offers illustrations of three such illusions of rationality. First, it is common in criminal law discourse for scholars and judges to cite any of the standard litany of "the purposes of punishment" -- just deserts, deterrence, incapacitation of the dangerous, rehabilitation, and sometimes other purposes -- as a justification for one or another liability rule or sentencing practice. The cited "purpose" gives the rules an aura of …

The Ex Ante Function Of The Criminal Law, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley, Kevin M. Carlsmith

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Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal conduct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines and governing their conduct accordingly. This is the "ex ante" function of the law; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or believe in the moral validity of the legal codes they do not cross these lines. But do people in fact know the lines that legal codes draw? The fact that several states have adopted laws that deviate from other state laws enables a field experiment to address this question. Residents (N = 203) of states …

Innocence Protection Act: Death Penalty Reform On The Horizon, Ronald Weich

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The criminal justice pendulum may be swinging back in the direction of fairness. The Innocence Protection Act of 2001, introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives earlier this year, promises meaningful reforms in the administration of capital punishment in the United States.

Unlike previous slabs at reform, the Innocence Protection Act (lPA) has a real chance to become law because it commands unusually broad bipartisan support. The Senate bill (S. 486) is sponsored by Democrat Pat Leahy of Vermont and Republican Gordon Smith of Oregon. The House bill (H.R. 912) is sponsored by Democrat Bill Delahunt of …

Accountability Solutions In The Consent Search And Seizure Wasteland, José F. Anderson

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The legal and social issues that have emerged out of the doctrine that people in America have a right against unreasonable government instituted searches and seizures have dominated the dialogue and controversy in the American criminal justice system over the last three decades. A large portion of the debate has centered around the controversial exclusionary rule, which frees the sometimes unmistakably guilty because of irregularities in police procedure.

The notion that society suffers when criminals go free because of the constable's blunder has struck a decidedly political note in the discussion over criminal justice reform. Many observers are quick to …

Punishing Dangerousness: Cloaking Preventive Detention As Criminal Justice, Paul H. Robinson

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Laypersons have traditionally thought of the criminal justice system as being in the business of doing justice: punishing offenders for the crimes they commit. Yet during the past several decades, the justice system's focus has shifted from punishing past crimes to preventing future violations through the incarceration and control of dangerous offenders. Habitual-offender statutes, such as "three strikes" laws, authorize life sentences for repeat offenders. Jurisdictional reforms have decreased the age at which juveniles may be tried as adults. Gang membership and recruitment are now punished. "Megan's Law" statutes require community notification of convicted sex offenders. "Sexual predator" statutes provide …

Law Enforcement By Stereotypes And Serendipity: Racial Profiling And Stops And Searches Without Cause, David Rudovsky

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No abstract provided.

Judicial Fact-Finding And Sentence Enhancements In A World Of Guilty Pleas, Stephanos Bibas

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No abstract provided.

Criminal Justice And Black Families: The Collateral Damage Of Over-Enforcement, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Testing Lay Intuitions Of Justice: How And Why?, Paul H. Robinson

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When John Darley and I wrote Justice, Liability, and Blame: Community Views and the Criminal Law, our goal was not to provide the definitive account of lay intuitions of justice but rather to stimulate interest in what we saw as an important but long-term project that would require the work of many people. Having this American Association of Law Schools program is itself something toward that end and for that we thank Christopher Slobogin and Cheryl Hanna. In this brief introduction to the Symposium, let me set the stage by doing four things. Part I of this Article summarizes the …

Structuring Criminal Codes To Perform Their Function, Paul H. Robinson

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This paper argues that criminal codes have two distinct functions. First, a code must ex ante announce the rules of conduct. Second, it must set out the principles of for adjudicating, ex post, violations of those rules. These two functions often are in tension with one another. Each calls for a different kind of code, addressed to a different audience, with different objectives: To be effective ex ante, the rules of conduct must be formulated in a way that they will be understood, remembered, and able to be applied in daily life by lay persons with a wide range of …

Why Does The Criminal Law Care What The Layperson Thinks Is Just? Coercive Versus Normative Crime Control, Paul H. Robinson

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THE criminal law codification movement of the 1960s and 70s was guided by instrumentalist principles designed to reduce crime, rather than by retributivist notions of giving offenders deserved punishment. The Model Penal Code, which served as a model for nearly all of the period's code reforms, was explicit on the point: The Code's "dominant theme is the prevention of offenses" and its "major goal is to forbid and prevent conduct that threatens substantial harm." Yet, as Part I of this Article will show, even from such a staunchly instrumentalist code came a criminal law that defers to laypersons' shared intuitions …

Creating And Solving The Problem Of Drug Use During Pregnancy, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Pollard Treated Unfairly, Kenneth Lasson

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No abstract provided.

Not So Hard (And Not So Special), After All: Comments On Zimring's "The Hardest Of The Hard Cases", Stephen J. Morse

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No abstract provided.

Foreword: Race, Vagueness, And The Social Meaning Of Order-Maintenance Policing, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Managed Care And Managed Sentencing — A Tale Of Two Systems, Ronald Weich

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The daily injustices mount. The front line professionals who administer the system cry out for more discretion to depart from the rigid rules that bind them, Congress finally hears their call, and is poised to enact sweeping reforms.

Are improvements in federal sentencing law on the way? Probably not in the near future. But the new Congress will surely take up proposals to regulate the managed health care industry, and the impending debate over a proposed "Patients' Bill of Rights" law offers important lessons for federal sentencing policy.

At first blush, sentencing reform and health care reform have about as …

Why Clinton Should Pardon Pollard – Now, Kenneth Lasson

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No abstract provided.

Objectivist Vs. Subjectivist Views Of Criminality: A Study In The Role Of Social Science In Criminal Law Theory, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley

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The authors use social science methodology to determine whether a doctrinal shift-from an objectivist view of criminality in the common law to a subjectivist view in modern criminal codes-is consistent with lay intuitions of the principles of justice. Commentators have suggested that lay perceptions of criminality have shifted in a way reflected in the doctrinal change, but the study results suggest a more nuanced conclusion: that the modern lay view agrees with the subjectivist view of modern codes in defining the minimum requirements of criminality, but prefers the common law's objectivist view of grading the punishment deserved. The authors argue …

Access To Justice And Civil Forfeiture Reform: Providing Lawyers For The Poor And Recapturing Forfeited Assets For Impoverished Comrnunities, Louis S. Rulli

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No abstract provided.

Pollard And Priorities, Kenneth Lasson

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No abstract provided.

Long Overdue, Kenneth Lasson

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No abstract provided.

The Utility Of Desert, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley

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The article takes up the debate between utility and desert as distributive principles for criminal liability and punishment and concludes that a utilitarian analysis that takes account of all costs and benefits will support the distribution of liability and punishment according to desert, or at least according to the principles of desert as perceived by the community. It reaches this conclusion after an examination of a variety of recent social science data. On the one hand, it finds the traditional utilitarian theories of deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation to have little effect in many instances. It finds instead that the real …

Immaturity And Irresponsibility, Stephen J. Morse

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No abstract provided.

Reforming The Federal Criminal Code: A Top Ten List, Paul H. Robinson

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No abstract provided.

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines Ten Years Later: An Introduction And Comments, Paul H. Robinson

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No abstract provided.

Consistently Inconsistent: The Supreme Court And The Confusion Surrounding Proportionality In Non-Capital Sentencing, Steven P. Grossman

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(Adapted by permission from 84 Ky. L. J. 107 (1995)) This article examines the Supreme Court's treatment of the Eighth Amendment with respect to claims of excessiveness regarding prison sentences. Specifically, it addresses the issue of whether and to what degree the Eighth Amendment requires that a punishment not be disproportional to the crime punished. In analyzing all of the modern holdings of the Court in this area, one finds significant fault with each. The result of this series of flawed opinions from the Supreme Court is that the state of the law with respect to proportionality in sentencing is …

The “Midnight Assassination Law” And Minnesota’S Anti-Death Penalty Movement, John Bessler

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This article traces the history of Minnesota's anti-death penalty movement and the 1889 Minnesota law - dubbed by contemporaries as the "midnight assassination law" - requiring private, nighttime executions. That law, authored by Minnesota legislator John Day Smith, restricted the number of execution spectators, prohibited newspapers from printing any execution details, and provided that only the fact of the execution could be lawfully printed. Also commonly referred to as the "John Day Smith law," this Minnesota statute was challenged as being unconstitutional by Minnesota newspapers after those newspapers printed details of a botched hanging and were charged with violating the …

The Criminal-Civil Distinction And The Utility Of Desert, Paul H. Robinson

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The communist Chinese have distinct criminal and civil systems, as do the democratic Swiss, and the monarchist Saudis.1 The criminal-civil distinction also is a basic organizing device for Islamic Pakistan, Catholic Ireland, Hindu India, and the atheistic former Soviet Union, industrialized Germany, rural Papua New Guinea, the tribal Bedouins, wealthy Singapore, impoverished Somalia, developing Thailand, newly organized Ukraine, and the ancient Romans. Apparently every society sufficiently developed to have a formal legal system usesthe criminal-civil distinction as an organizing principle. Why? Why has every society felt it necessary to create a system to impose criminal liability distinct from civil liability?

Blame And Danger: An Essay On Preventive Detention, Stephen J. Morse

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No abstract provided.

Proportionality In Non-Capital Sentencing: The Supreme Court's Tortured Approach To Cruel And Unusual Punishment, Steven P. Grossman

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This Article examines the Supreme Court's treatment of the Eighth Amendment with respect to claims of excessive prison sentences. Specifically, it addresses the issue of whether and to what degree the Eighth Amendment requires that a punishment not be disproportionate to the crime. In analyzing all of the modern holdings of the Court in this area, this Article finds significant fault with each. The result of this series of flawed opinions from the Supreme Court is that the state of the law with respect to proportionality in sentencing is confused, and what law can be discerned rests on weak foundations. …