Criminal 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.

Nameless Justice: The Case For The Routine Use Of Anonymous Juries In Criminal Trials, Nancy J. King

Vanderbilt Law Review

We ask a lot of our jurors. The financial and emotional burdens of jury duty can be significant even in mundane cases. Deciding another's fate is often a trying ordeal, aggravated by unintelligible instructions, hostile attorneys or court personnel, miserable working conditions, and interminable delays. The voir dire process may require jurors to reveal intimate, embarrassing, or damning information about themselves and their families that they would not voluntarily choose to reveal. Confronted with allegations of violence, injury, or abuse, some jurors become traumatized or ill. On top of all of this, jury service exposes jurors, their families, and their …