Distributive Principles Of Criminal Law

Drawing from the existing theoretical literature and adding to it recent insights from the social sciences, Paul Robinson describes the nature of the practical challenge in setting rational punishment principles, how past efforts have failed, and the alternatives that have been tried.

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.

The rules governing who will be punished and how much determine a society's success in two of its most fundamental functions: doing justice and protecting citizens from crime. Drawing from the existing theoretical literature and adding to it recent insights from the social sciences, Paul Robinson describes the nature of the practical challenge in setting rational punishment principles, how past efforts have failed, and the alternatives that have been tried. He ultimately proposes a principle for distributing criminal liability and punishment that will be most likely to do justice and control crime. Paul Robinson is one of the world's leading criminal law experts. He has been writing about criminal liability and punishment issues for three decades, and has published dozens of influential articles in the best scholarly journals. This long-awaited volume is a brilliant synthesis of social science research and legal reasoning that brings together three decades of work in a compelling line of argument that addresses all of the important issues in assessing liability and punishment.

"The Most Important Treatise on Criminal Law Produced by American Legal Scholarship" First published to great acclaim in 1947, Hall's General Principles of Criminal Law is one of the undisputed classics in its field. It provides more than a broad overview. Drawing on his expertise in jurisprudence and the work of the legal realists, it analyzes the principles that comprise criminal activity with an emphasis on its creation and definition by officials. This process is explored in the chapters on criminology, criminal theory and penal theory and, in more specific terms, the chapters on legality, mens rea, harm, causation, punishment, strict liability, ignorance and mistake, necessity and coercion, mental disease, intoxication and criminal attempt. "For many years, our standard work on criminal law has been Bishop's. First published in 1856, Bishop's is the only American book in the field that has conspicuously influenced our criminal law. (...) When Jerome Hall's, General Principles of Criminal Law (1947) appeared, it represented the first significant effort to articulate the principles of criminal law since Bishop's era. Hall's work may, in fact, represent the most important treatise on criminal law produced by American legal scholarship." --Fred Cohen, Journal of Legal Education 16 (1963-64) 260.

Containing 40 visually coded maps of the fifty states, this book offers an unprecedented look at America's diverse legal landscape. This first-of-its-kind volume sketches the diversity implicit in United States criminal law doctrine through its examination of a range of criminal laws pertaining to murder, sexual assault, drug offenses, the insanity defense, and more and the way in which different states deal with those issues. In addition to providing insights into the most widely invoked standards in criminal law, it raises awareness of the enormous discrepancies among the criminal laws of states, documenting them using dozens of visually coded maps that showcase geographic, political, and socioeconomic differences to explain patterns of agreement and disagreement. Mapping American Criminal Law: Variations Across the 50 States is for political scientists, criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars, policy advisors, legislators, lawyers, judges, and scholars and students of these fields. In addition, each chapter is highly accessible to laypersons and includes an explanation of the subject matter as well as explanations of the various approaches to criminal law taken by states.

A student treatise that explains the basic rules on all core criminal law topics, including the Model Penal Code’s position and the most of the common deviations from it.

Completely updated and restructured with new hypotheticals that introduce chapters and highlight important issues, this revision of FUNDAMENTALS OF CRIMINAL LAW by noted scholar Paul Robinson offers straightforward and comprehensive coverage of the full range of Criminal Law in a concise, manageable size. In his casebook, Robinson emphasizes a basic understanding of statutory criminal law-showing your students the interplay between cases and doctrines and codes and statutes, including the Model Penal Code. The book covers the essentials for your course while maintaining and excellent teaching length. New coverage includes: -RICO -hate crimes -sexual offenses -burdens of proof Robinson covers the essential procedural, constitutional, and historical issues students need to understand substantive criminal law. each chapter opens with a hypothetical or actual fact pattern to focus student attention on important issues. These also serve as efficient, recurring reference points that bind the cases, statutes, literature, notes, and questions that follow. With classroom concerns in mind, Robinson has added extensive notes, questions, and comments to raise relevant issues. He includes excerpts from code commentary, A.L.I. Floor Debate, newspaper articles, charts, books, and law review articles.