Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Law
Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse
Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
Professor Gideon Yaffe’s recent, intricately argued book, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility, argues against the nearly uniform position in both law and scholarship that the criminal justice system should give juveniles a break not because on average they have different capacities relevant to responsibility than adults, but because juveniles have little say about the criminal law, primarily because they do not have a vote. For Professor Yaffe, age has political rather than behavioral significance. The book has many excellent general analyses about responsibility, but all are in aid of the central thesis about …
A Core Of Agreement, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman
A Core Of Agreement, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman
All Faculty Scholarship
In this short comment, we respond to papers by Robinson, Kurzban, and Jones (RKJ) and by Darley, who replied to our paper, Punishment Naturalism. We align ourselves wholeheartedly with Darley’s argument that intuitions of criminal wrongdoing, while mediated by cognitive mechanisms that are largely universal, consist in evaluations that vary significantly across cultural groups. RKJ defend their finding of “universal” intuitions of “core” of criminal wrongdoing. They acknowledge, however, that their method for identifying the core excludes by design factors that predictably generate cultural variance in what behavior counts as murder, rape, theft and other “core” offenses. On this basis, …
Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman
Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman
All Faculty Scholarship
In this paper we critique the increasingly prominent claims of punishment naturalism – the notion that highly nuanced intuitions about most forms of crime and punishment are broadly shared, and that this agreement is best explained by a particular form of evolutionary psychology. While the core claims of punishment naturalism are deeply attractive and intuitive, they are contradicted by a broad array of studies and depend on a number of logical missteps. The most obvious shortcoming of punishment naturalism is that it ignores empirical research demonstrating deep disagreements over what constitutes a wrongful act and just how wrongful it should …
Can Law And Economics Be Both Practical And Principled?, David A. Hoffman, Michael P. O'Shea
Can Law And Economics Be Both Practical And Principled?, David A. Hoffman, Michael P. O'Shea
All Faculty Scholarship
This article describes important recent developments in normative law and economics, and the difficulties they create for the project of efficiency-based legal reform. After long proceeding without a well articulated moral justification for using economic decision procedures to choose legal rules, scholars have lately begun to devote serious attention to developing a philosophically attractive definition of well-being. At the same time, the empirical side of law and economics is also being enriched with an improved understanding of the complexities of individuals' decision-making behavior. That is where the problems begin. Scholars may have better, more plausible conceptions of well-being in hand, …