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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Beyond Experience: Getting Retributive Justice Right, Dan Markel, Chad Flanders, David C. Gray
Beyond Experience: Getting Retributive Justice Right, Dan Markel, Chad Flanders, David C. Gray
David C. Gray
How central should hedonic adaptation be to the establishment of sentencing policy? In earlier work, Professors Bronsteen, Buccafusco, and Masur (BBM) drew some normative significance from the psychological studies of adaptability for punishment policy. In particular, they argued that retributivists and utilitarians alike are obliged on pain of inconsistency to take account of the fact that most prisoners, most of the time, adapt to imprisonment in fairly short order, and therefore suffer much less than most of us would expect. They also argued that ex-prisoners don't adapt well upon re-entry to society and that social planners should consider their post-release …
Retributivism For Progressives: A Response To Professor Flanders, David C. Gray, Jonathan Huber
Retributivism For Progressives: A Response To Professor Flanders, David C. Gray, Jonathan Huber
David C. Gray
In his engaging article "Retributivism and Reform," published in the Maryland Law Review, Chad Flanders engages two claims he ascribes to James Q. Whitman: 1) that American criminal justice is too "harsh," and 2) that Americans’ reliance on retributivist theories of criminal punishment is implicated in that harshness. In this invited response, to which Flanders subsequently replied, we first ask what "harsh" might mean in the context of a critique of criminal justice and punishment. We conclude that the most likely candidate is something along the lines of "disproportionate or otherwise unjustified." With this working definition in hand, we measure …