Criminal Law Commons^™

Small Crimes, Big Injustices, Stephanos Bibas

Michigan Law Review

Review of Alexandra Natapoff's Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.

Criminal Justice And The Mattering Of Lives, Deborah Tuerkheimer

Michigan Law Review

A review of James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

The Consensus Myth In Criminal Justice Reform, Benjamin Levin

Michigan Law Review

It has become popular to identify a “consensus” on criminal justice reform, but how deep is that consensus, actually? This Article argues that the purported consensus is much more limited than it initially appears. Despite shared reformist vocabulary, the consensus rests on distinct critiques that identify different flaws and justify distinct policy solutions. The underlying disagreements transcend traditional left/right political divides and speak to deeper disputes about the state and the role of criminal law in society.

The Article maps two prevailing, but fundamentally distinct, critiques of criminal law: (1) the quantitative approach (what I call the “over” frame); and …

Facing Evil, Joseph E. Kennedy

Michigan Law Review

It is no earthshaking news that the American public has become fascinated- some would say obsessed-with crime over the last few decades. Moreover, this fascination has translated into a potent political force that has remade the world of criminal justice. Up through the middle of the 1960s crime was not something about which politicians had much to say. What was there to say? "Crime is bad." "We do what we can about crime." "Crime will always be with us at one level or another." Only a hermit could have missed the transformation of crime over the last couple of decades …

Deterrence's Difficulty, Neal Kumar Katyal

Michigan Law Review

We all crave simple elegance. Physicists since Einstein have been searching for a grand unified theory that will tie everything together in a simple model. Law professors have their own grand theories - law and economics's Coase Theorem and constitutional law's Originalism immediately spring to mind. Criminal law is no different, for the analogue is our faith in deterrence - the belief that increasing the penalty on an activity will mean that fewer people will perform it. This theory has much to commend it. After all, economists and shoppers have known for ages that a price increase in a good …

Dangerous Offenders: The Elusive Target Of Justice, Elizabeth T. Lear

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Dangerous Offenders: The Elusive Target of Justice by Mark H. Moore, Susan Estrich, Daniel McGillis, and William Spelman

A Capacity To Punish: The Ecology Of Crime And Punishment, Samuel M. Hill

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Capacity to Punish: The Ecology of Crime and Punishment by Henry N. Pontell

Just And Painful: A Case For The Corporal Punishment Of Criminals, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Just and Painful: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals by Graeme Newman

Troubling Questions: A Review Of The Decline Of The Rehabilitative Ideal, Sheldon L. Messinger

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal: Penal Policy and Social Purpose by Francis A. Allen

Desert And Deterrence: An Assessment Of The Moral Bases Of The Case For Capital Punishment, Richard O. Lempert

Michigan Law Review

The controversy over the death penalty has generated arguments of two types. The first argument appeals to moral intuitions; the second concerns deterrence. Although both types of argument speak to the morality of systems of capital punishment, the first debate has been dominated by moral philosophers and the second by empirical social scientists. For convenience I shall at times refer to the approach of the moral philosophers as the moral case for (or against) capital punishment or as the argument from morality.

Due Process And Punishment, Clarence E. Laylin, Alonzo H. Tuttle

Michigan Law Review

To threaten such a man with punishment," wrote Sir James .LFitzjames Stephen,' "is like threatening to punish a man for not lifting a weight which he cannot move."