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Distributive Principles of Criminal Law

Distributive Principles of Criminal Law Who Should be Punished How Much?

Author: Paul H Robinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
ISBN: 9780195365757
Published In: October 2008
Format: Hardback , 288 pages
Jurisdiction: U.S. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Offers a realistic, social-science based critique of competing theories of punishment
Explains how principles of punishment can and cannot be combined
Proposes a single principle for distributing criminal liability and punishment

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.

Chapter 1. Distributing Criminal Liability and Punishment
Chapter 2. The Need for an Articulated Distributive Principle
Chapter 3. Does Criminal Law Deter?
Chapter 4. Deterrence as a Distributive Principle
Chapter 5. Rehabilitation
Chapter 6. Incapacitation of the Dangerous
Chapter 7. Competing Conceptions of Desert: Vengeful, Deontological, and Empirical
Chapter 8. The Utility of Desert
Chapter 9. Restorative Justice
Chapter 10.The Strengths & Weaknesses of Alterative Distributive Principles
Chapter 11.Hybrid Distributive Principles
Chapter 12. A Practical Theory of Justice: Proposal for a Hybrid Distributive Principle Centered on Empirical Desert
Index

Paul H. Robinson, the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the world's leading experts on criminal law. Holding law degrees from U.C.L.A., Harvard, and Cambridge, he 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, where he was the lone dissenter to promulgation of what are the current federal sentencing guidelines. Among his dozen books are the standard lawyer's reference book on criminal law defenses, an internationally known Oxford monograph on criminal law theory, a highly-regarded criminal law treatise, a popular innovative case studies course book, and a ground-breaking empirical study of the conflict between criminal law rules and lay intuitions of justice. He also has published scholarly articles in nearly ever top law review. Robinson, who has given scholarly lectures and assisted in criminal code reform throughout the world, led two recent criminal code reform projects in the United States and, under United Nations sponsorship, directed the effort in producing the first Islamic criminal code to use a modern code format.