Research suggests that people of all demographics have nuanced and sophisticated notions of justice. Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert sketches the contours of a wide range of lay judgments of justice, touching many if not most of the issues that penal code drafters or policy makers must face.

• Preface and Acknowledgments


• Selected Robinson Bibliography


• Part I. The Nature of Judgments About Justice


• Chapter 1. Judgments About Justice as Intuitional and Nuanced


• Chapter 2. Judgments About Justice as a Human Universal: Agreements on a Core of Wrongdoing


• Chapter 3. The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice


• Chapter 4. Disagreements About Justice


• Chapter 5. Changing People's Judgments of Justice


• Part II. Should the Criminal Law Care What the Lay Person Thinks Is Just?


• Chapter 6. Current Law's Deference to Lay Judgments of Justice


• Chapter 7. Current Law's Conflicts with Lay Judgments of Justice


• Chapter 8. Normative Crime Control: The Utility of Desert


• Chapter 9. Building Moral Credibility and the Disutility of Injustice


• Chapter 10. Deviations from Empirical Desert


• Chapter 11. Implications for Criminal Justice and Other Reform


• Part III. The Content of Lay Judgments of Justice


• Chapter 12. Rules of Conduct: Doctrines of Criminalization


• Chapter 13. Rules of Conduct: Doctrines of Justification


• Chapter 14. Principles of Adjudication: Doctrines of Culpability


• Chapter 15. Principles of Adjudication: Doctrines of Excuse


• Chapter 16. Principles of Adjudication: Doctrines of Grading


• Chapter 17. Law-Community Agreement and Conflict, and Its Implications


• Part IV. Empirical Studies of Lay Judgments of Justice as a Law and Policy Tool


• Chapter 18. Explaining History: Shifting Views of Criminality


• Chapter 19. Testing Competing Theories: Blackmail


• Chapter 20. Testing Competing Theories: Justification Defenses


• Chapter 21. Guiding Judicial Discretion: Extralegal Punishment Factors


• Chapter 22. Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert

Paul H. Robinson is the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a leading expert on criminal law. Professor Robinson holds law degrees from U.C.L.A., Harvard, and Cambridge. He has 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. He is an editor of Criminal Law Conversations (Oxford 2009), and author of Distributive Principles of Criminal Law: Who Should Be Punished How Much? (Oxford 2008) and Law Without Justice: Why Criminal Law Doesn't Give People What They Deserve (Oxford 2005).