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Review Essay: Golden Rule Ethics And The Death Of The Criminal Law's Special Part, Stuart Green
Review Essay: Golden Rule Ethics And The Death Of The Criminal Law's Special Part, Stuart Green
Stuart Green
This brief review of Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law, by Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, with Stephen Morse, focuses on the authors’ proposal that the Special Part of the criminal law, the part that identifies and defines specific offenses, be radically stripped down in a manner that is reminiscent of the Golden Rule of Ethics, which, they say, offers a “clear” and “concise” guide to living ethically. Rather than a long list of specific prohibited forms of conduct (“don’t murder,” “don’t rape,” “don’t commit theft,” and the like), they argue, the criminal law should rely on …
Hard Times, Hard Time: Retributive Justice For Unjustly Disadvantaged Offenders, Stuart Green
Hard Times, Hard Time: Retributive Justice For Unjustly Disadvantaged Offenders, Stuart Green
Stuart Green
Criminological studies consistently indicate that a disproportionate percentage of crimes in our society, both violent and non-violent, are committed by those who are impoverished. If we assume that at least some of the poor who commit crimes are poor because they fail to get from society what they “deserve” in terms of economic or political or social rights, the question arises whether this fact should affect the determination of what such people “deserve” from society in terms of punishment. The question is all the more pressing given recent Census Bureau figures indicating that the economic recession that began in 2008 …