Justice, Liability, and Blame: Community Views and the Criminal Law

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 instantiated 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 theori...