Full Description
Research suggests that people of all demographics have nuanced and sophisticated notions of justice. In this intriguing new book, Paul H. Robinson demonstrates that judicial decisions that deviate from public conceptions of justice and desert can seriously undermine the American criminal justice system's integrity and legitimacy by failing to recognize or meet the needs of the communities it serves.
Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert sketches the contours of a wide range of lay conceptions of justice, touching many if not most of the issues that penal code drafters or policy makers must face, including normative crime control, universal understandings of justice, culpability, principles of adjudication, grading sentencing, justification defenses, and judicial discretion. Robinson warns that compromising the American criminal justice system to satisfy other interests can uncover hidden the costs incurred when a community's notions about justice are not reflected in its criminal laws. By ignoring the intuitions 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 legitimacy, creating a gap between what justice a community needs and what justice a court or law prescribes.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ; Selected Robinson Bibliography ; Part I. The Nature of Judgments About Justice ; Chapter 1. Judgments About Justice as Intuitional and Nuanced ; Chapter 2. Judgments About Justice as a Human Universal: Agreements on a Core of Wrongdoing ; Chapter 3. The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice ; Chapter 4. Disagreements About Justice ; Chapter 5. Changing People's Judgments of Justice ; Part II. Should the Criminal Law Care What the Lay Person Thinks Is Just? ; Chapter 6. Current Law's Deference to Lay Judgments of Justice ; Chapter 7. Current Law's Conflicts with Lay Judgments of Justice ; Chapter 8. Normative Crime Control: The Utility of Desert ; Chapter 9. Building Moral Credibility and the Disutility of Injustice ; Chapter 10. Deviations from Empirical Desert ; Chapter 11. Implications for Criminal Justice and Other Reform ; Part III. The Content of Lay Judgments of Justice ; Chapter 12. Rules of Conduct: Doctrines of Criminalization ; Chapter 13. Rules of Conduct: Doctrines of Justification ; Chapter 14. Principles of Adjudication: Doctrines of Culpability ; Chapter 15. Principles of Adjudication: Doctrines of Excuse ; Chapter 16. Principles of Adjudication: Doctrines of Grading ; Chapter 17. Law-Community Agreement and Conflict, and Its Implications ; Part IV. Empirical Studies of Lay Judgments of Justice as a Law and Policy Tool ; Chapter 18. Explaining History: Shifting Views of Criminality ; Chapter 19. Testing Competing Theories: Blackmail ; Chapter 20. Testing Competing Theories: Justification Defenses ; Chapter 21. Guiding Judicial Discretion: Extralegal Punishment Factors ; Chapter 22. Intuitions of Justice & the Utility of Desert
