Paul Robinson's brilliant synthesis of social science research and legal reasoning analyzes the competing principles of punishment and proposes a single principle to govern the distribution of criminal 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 and 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.