Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Lost In A Legal Thicket, Paul H. Robinson

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This op-ed piece argues that criminal law recodification is badly needed in the states and the federal system, but that prosecutors stand out as the group who appear to regularly oppose it.

Framing For A New Transnational Legal Order: The Case Of Human Trafficking, Paulette Lloyd, Beth A. Simmons

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How does transnational legal order emerge, develop and solidify? This chapter focuses on how and why actors come to define an issue as one requiring transnational legal intervention of a specific kind. Specifically, we focus on how and why states have increasingly constructed and acceded to international legal norms relating to human trafficking. Empirically, human trafficking has been on the international and transnational agenda for nearly a century. However, relatively recently – and fairly swiftly in the 2000s – governments have committed themselves to criminalize human trafficking in international as well as regional and domestic law. Our paper tries to …

Justice: 1850s San Francisco And The California Gold Rush, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

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Using stories from the 1848-1851 California gold miners, the 1851 San Francisco vigilante committees, Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s, and wagon trains of American westward migration in the 1840s, the chapter illustrates that it is part of human nature to see doing justice as a value in itself—in people’s minds it is not dependent for justification on the practical benefits it brings. Having justice done is sufficiently important to people that they willingly suffer enormous costs to obtain it, even when they were neither hurt by the wrong nor in a position to benefit from punishing the wrongdoer.

This …

Punishment: Drop City And The Utopian Communes, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

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Using stories from the utopian non-punishment hippie communes of the late 1960's, the essay challenges today’s anti-punishment movement by demonstrating that the benefits of cooperative action are available only with the adoption of a system for punishing violations of core rules. Rather than being an evil system anathema to right-thinking people, punishment is the lynchpin of the cooperative action that has created human success.

This is Chapter 3 from the general audience book Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the Law. Chapter 4 of the book is also available on SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2416484).

The Model Penal Code's Conceptual Error On The Nature Of Proximate Cause, And How To Fix It, Paul H. Robinson

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The Model Penal Code reconceptualized proximate cause to see it as part of the offense culpability requirements rather than as, in the traditional view, a minimum requirement for the strength of the connection between the actor's conduct and the prohibited result. That conceptual error, rare in the well-thought-out Model Code, invites misinterpretation and misapplication of the proximate cause provision, and can produce improper liability results. The failure is all the more unfortunate because the Model Code drafters did have an important improvement to offer in dealing with the challenging issue of proximate cause. Their jettison of fixed detailed rules in …

Freedom From Violence And The Law: A Global Perspective In Light Of Chinese Domestic Violence Law, 2015, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Jeni Klugman

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No abstract provided.

The Rise And Fall And Resurrection Of American Criminal Codes, Paul H. Robinson

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This brief essay summarizes the virtues of the modern American codification movement of the 1960s and 70s, putting it in a larger global context, then describes how these once-enviable codes have been systematically degraded with thoughtless amendments, a process of degradation that is accelerating each year. After exploring the political dynamics that promote such degradation, the essay suggests the principles and procedures for fixing the current codes and, more importantly, structural changes to the process that could avoid the restart of degradation in the future.

Of Weevils And Witches: What Can We Learn From The Ghost Of Responsibility Past, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

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No abstract provided.

The Moral Vigilante And Her Cousins In The Shadows, Paul H. Robinson

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By definition, vigilantes cannot be legally justified – if they satisfied a justification defense, for example, they would not be law-breakers – but they may well be morally justified, if their aim is to provide the order and justice that the criminal justice system has failed to provide in a breach of the social contract. Yet, even moral vigilantism is detrimental to society and ought to be avoided, ideally not by prosecuting moral vigilantism but by avoiding the creation of situations that would call for it. Unfortunately, the U.S. criminal justice system has adopted a wide range of criminal law …

Collateral Consequences And The Preventive State, Sandra G. Mayson

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Approximately eight percent of adults in the United States have a felony conviction. The “collateral consequences” of criminal conviction (CCs) — legal disabilities imposed by legislatures on the basis of conviction, but not as part of the sentence — have relegated that group to permanent second class legal status. Despite the breadth and significance of this demotion, the Constitution has provided no check; courts have almost uniformly rejected constitutional challenges to CCs. Among scholars, practitioners and mainstream media, a consensus has emerged that the courts have erred by failing to recognize CCs as a form of additional punishment. Courts should …

Frames And Consensus Formation In International Relations: The Case Of Trafficking In Persons, Volha Charnysh, Paulette Lloyd, Beth A. Simmons

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This article examines the process of consensus formation by the international community regarding how to confront the problem of trafficking in persons. We analyze the corpus of United Nations General Assembly Third Committee resolutions to show that: (1) consensus around the issue of how to confront trafficking in persons has increased over time; and (2) the formation of this consensus depends upon how the issue is framed. We test our argument by examining the characteristics of resolutions’ sponsors and discursive framing concepts such as crime, human rights, and the strength of enforcement language. We conclude that the consensus-formation process in …