This conference and symposium are important for their ability to make better known the great benefits in the use of restorative processes. Below I try to summarize some of the many promising achievements of those processes, by which I mean to include such practices as victim-offender mediation,...

This conference and symposium are important for their ability to make better known the great benefits in the use of restorative processes. Below I try to summarize some of the many promising achievements of those processes, by which I mean to include such practices as victim-offender mediation,...

The victims' rights movement has come into increasing influence in setting criminal justice policy. What can be said about where its influence should be heeded, and where it should not? With regard to substantive criminal law in particular, should the victims' rights movement have influence over...

Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal conduct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines and governing their conduct accordingly. This is the "ex ante" function of the law; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or...

Laypersons have traditionally thought of the criminal justice system as being in the business of doing justice: punishing offenders for the crimes they commit. [FN1] Yet during the past several decades, the justice system's focus has shifted from punishing past crimes to preventing future...

The criminal justice system has traditionally been seen as in the business of doing justice: punishing offenders for crimes committed. Yet, the past decade has brought a shift from punishing past crimes to preventing future crimes through the incarceration and control of dangerous offenders....

When John Darley and I wrote Justice, Liability, and Blame: Community Views and the Criminal Law, our goal was not to provide the definitive account of lay intuitions of justice but rather to stimulate interest in what we saw as an important but long-term project that would require the work of...

The paper criticizes criminal law scholarship for helping to construct and failing to expose analytic structures that falsely claim a higher level of rationality and coherence than current criminal law theory deserves. It offers illustrations of three such illusions of rationality. First, it is...

Each American jurisdiction has a criminal code. Most jurisdictions have substantially restructured and improved their codes since 1962, when the American Law Institute first promulgated its Model Penal Code. Such reform efforts are worthwhile, especially in criminal law, because many advantages...

THE criminal law codification movement of the 1960s and 70s was guided by instrumentalist principles designed to reduce crime, rather than by retributivist notions of giving offenders deserved punishment. The Model Penal Code, which served as a model for nearly all of the period's code reforms,...