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The Rule Of Law As An Institutional Ideal, Gianluigi Palombella Jan 2010

The Rule Of Law As An Institutional Ideal, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article aims at offering an innovative interpretation of the potentialities of the "rule of law" for the XXI Century. It goes beyond current uses and the dispute between formal and substantive conceptions, by reaching the roots of the institutional ideal. Also through historical reconstruction and comparative analysis, the core of the rule of law appears to be a peculiar notion, showing a special objective that the law is asked to achieve, on a legal plane, largely independent of political instrumentalism. The normative meaning is elaborated on and construed around the notions of institutional equilibrium, non domination and "duality" of …


A Core Of Agreement, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman Jan 2010

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 Jan 2010

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 …