Justice, Liability And Blame: Community Views And The Criminal Law

by Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley

Drafters of legal codes often implicitly or explicitly seek to incorporate community standards. To what extent have they succeeded? This book examines shared intuitive notions of justice among laypersons and compares the discovered principles to those intantiated in current American criminal codes. After discussion of the proper role of community views in formulating legal doctrine, Robinson and Darley report eighteen original studies on a wide range of issues in dispute among legal theorists. The authors compare lay institutions and code provisions on such questions as the justified use of force, insanity, causation, complicity, risk-creation, omission liability, culpability requirements, duress, entrapment, multiple offenses, and criminalization matters such as felony murder and sexual offenses. Many important differences between the legal code and community views are found, and the authors discuss the implications of thosedifferences. One implication is the possibility that such conflicts could lead to reduced compliance as the code loses its moral authority with the community.

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Paul Robinson is one of the world’s leading criminal law scholars. A former federal prosecutor and counsel for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures, he was the lone dissenter when the U.S. Sentencing Commission promulgated the current federal sentencing guidelines. Among his books are the standard lawyer’s reference on criminal law defenses, two Oxford monographs on criminal law theory, a highly regarded criminal law treatise, and an innovative case studies course book.

He is the lead editor of Criminal Law Conversations (Oxford, 2009), based on a 10-month online debate by more than 100 scholars from around the world, and author of Distributive Principles of Criminal Law: Who Should Be Punished How Much? (Oxford, 2008; also appearing in Spanish and Chinese). Robinson recently completed two criminal code reform projects in the United States and the first modern Islamic penal code under the auspices of the U.N. Development Program. He also writes for general audiences, including popular books such as Would You Convict? Seventeen Cases that Challenged the Law (NYU, 1999) and Law without Justice: Why Criminal Law Doesn’t Give People What They Deserve (Oxford, 2005).