Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert

Research suggests that people of all demographics have nuanced and sophisticated notions of justice. The core of those judgments is often intuition rather than reason. Should the criminal law heed what principles are embodied in those deep seated judgments?

In Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert, Paul H. Robinson demonstrates that criminal law rules that deviate from public conceptions of justice and desert can seriously undermine the American criminal justice system's integrity and credibility by failing to recognize or meet the needs of
the communities it serves.

Professor Robinson sketches the contours of a wide range of lay conceptions of what criminals justly deserve, touching upon many issues that penal code drafters or policy makers must face, including normative crime control, culpability, grading, sentencing, justification and excuse defenses,
principles of adjudication, and judicial discretion. He warns that compromising the American criminal justice system to satisfy other interests can uncover the hidden costs incurred when a community's notions about justice are not reflected in its criminal laws.

Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert shows that by ignoring the views of justice held by the communities they serve, legislators, policymakers, and judges undermine the relevance of the criminal justice system and reduce its strength and credibility, creating a gap between what justice a
community needs and what justice a court or law prescribes.


Author: Paul H. Robinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 05/03/2013
Pages: 584
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.11lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780199917723

About the Author

Paul H. Robinson is the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a leading expert on criminal law. Professor Robinson holds law degrees from U.C.L.A., Harvard, and Cambridge. He has served as a federal prosecutor, as counsel for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Law, and as one of the original commissioners of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. He is an editor of Criminal Law Conversations (Oxford 2009), and author of Distributive Principles of Criminal Law: Who Should Be Punished How Much? (Oxford 2008) and Law Without Justice: Why Criminal Law Doesn't Give People What They Deserve (Oxford 2005).

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