Law Commons^™

The Right Deed For The Wrong Reason: A Reply To Mr. Robinson, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

So far as there is a school of criminal theory in the United States, it is a school devoted to sifting and celebrating the purposes of the criminal law. Discussions in the literature are dominated by endless recitals of the deterrent, rehabilitative and retributive functions of criminal sanctions. The orthodox view is that all of these purposes are relevant and that any proposed rule of criminal law must be measured by its tendency to further one or all of these goals. If the issue is punishing negligence, for example, the standard mode of analysis is to ask whether punishing negligent …