The book shows how moral theory can challenge and improve international criminal law and how extreme cases can challenge and improve mainstream theory.

This book offers a moral argument for world government, claiming that not only do we have strong obligations to people elsewhere, but that accountable integration among nation-states will help ensure all persons can lead a decent life.

Legal decisions continue to mystify: why was this person sentenced to 20 years in prison, but that person to just 10 years for the same crime? Why did one person sue for civil damages, but another let the matter drop? Legal rules are supposed to answer these questions, but their answers are radically incomplete. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a theory that predicted and explained legal decisions? Drawing on Donald Black’s theoretical ideas, Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in America addresses these issues, focusing specifi cally on who is sentenced to death and executed in the United States. The book explains why some murders are more serious than others and how the social characteristics of defendants, victims, and jurors aff ect case outcomes. Building on the most rigorous data in the field, the authors reveal wide discrepancies in capital punishment – why one person lives, but another person dies. Geometrical Justice will be of interest to those engaged in criminal justice, criminology, and socio- legal studies, as well as students taking courses on sentencing, corrections, and capital punishment.

At the century's end, societies all over the world are throwing off the yoke of authoritarian rule and beginning to build democracies. At any such time of radical change, the question arises: should a society punish its ancien regime or let bygones be bygones? Transitional Justice takes this question to a new level with an interdisciplinary approach that challenges the very terms of the contemporary debate. Ruti Teitel explores the recurring dilemma of how regimes should respond to evil rule, arguing against the prevailing view favoring punishment, yet contending that the law nevertheless plays a profound role in periods of radical change. Pursuing a comparative and historical approach, she presents a compelling analysis of constitutional, legislative, and administrative responses to injustice following political upheaval. She proposes a new normative conception of justice--one that is highly politicized--offering glimmerings of the rule of law that, in her view, have become symbols of liberal transition. Its challenge to the prevailing assumptions about transitional periods makes this timely and provocative book essential reading for policymakers and scholars of revolution and new democracies.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

What is fair? How and when can punishment be legitimate? Is there recompense for human suffering? How can we understand ideas about immortality or an afterlife in the context of critical thinking on the human condition? In this book L. E. Goodman presents the first general theory of justice in this century to make systematic use of the Jewish sources and to bring them into a philosophical dialogue with the leading ethical and political texts of the Western tradition. Goodman takes an ontological approach to questions of natural and human justice, developing a theory of community and of nonvindictive yet retributive punishment that is grounded in careful analysis of various Jewish sources--biblical, rabbinic, and philosophical, His exegesis of these sources allow Plato, Kant, and Rawls to join in a discourse with Spinoza and medieval rationalists, such as Saasidah and Maimonides, who speak in a very different idiom but address many of the same themes. Drawing on sources old and new, Jewish and non-Jewish, Goodman offers fresh perspectives on important moral and theological issues that will be of interest to both Jewish and secular philosophers.

Lenn E. Goodman here pioneers a general theory of justice that takes seriously the Jewish sources—biblical, rabbinic, and philosophic. Bringing Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Rawls into dialogue with Saadiah, Halevi, Maimonides, and Spinoza, Goodman’s ontological account offers fresh and original perspectives in moral and social philosophy.

At last, here is an empirical volume that addresses head-on the thorny issue of tort reform in the US. Ongoing policy debates regarding tort reform have led both legal analysts and empirical researchers to reevaluate the civil jury’s role in meting out civil justice. Some reform advocates have called for removing certain types of more complex cases from the jury’s purview; yet much of the policy debate has proceeded in the absence of data on what the effects of such reforms would be. In addressing these issues, this crucial work takes an empirical approach, relying on archival and experimental data. It stands at the vanguard of the debate and provides information relevant to both state and national civil justice systems.

Examines the most prominent criminal justice policies, finding that they fall short of achieving the effectiveness that policymakers have advocated.