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Criminal Law

Selected Works

Owen Jones

2019

Culture

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Sex, Culture, And The Biology Of Rape: Toward Explanation And Prevention, Owen D. Jones Apr 2019

Sex, Culture, And The Biology Of Rape: Toward Explanation And Prevention, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

For all that has been written about rape, its multiple causes remain insufficiently understood for law to deter it effectively. This follows, in part, from inadequately interdisciplinary study of rape causation. This Article argues that integrating life science and social science perspectives on sexual aggression can improve law's model of rape behavior, and further our efforts to reduce its incidence.

The Article first explains biobehavioral theories of sexual aggression, and offers a guide to common but avoidable errors in assessing them. It then compares a number of those theories' predictions with existing data and demonstrates how knowledge of the effects …


Intuitions Of Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Robert Kurzban Apr 2019

Intuitions Of Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Robert Kurzban

Owen Jones

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.