The state's power to punish and its limits — the elements of an offence, the defences, and the procedure that constrains the process.
12 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Fifteen Years of Guidelines Sentencing
United States Sentencing Commission · 2004
The federal agency that writes the sentencing guidelines assesses its own first fifteen years, showing discretion shifted from judges to prosecutors…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Two Models of the Criminal Process
Herbert L. Packer · 1964
Contrasts a due-process model that treats the criminal process as an obstacle course protecting the accused with a crime-control model built for…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Mens Rea
Francis Bowes Sayre · 1932
Traces mens rea from a single general moral-fault requirement into a fragmented set of specific mental elements attached to each offence, and argues…
+6 more at this level
11 works
United States Sentencing Commission
The federal agency that writes the sentencing guidelines assesses its own first fifteen years, showing discretion shifted from judges to prosecutors as sentences became more uniform but not shorter.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Herbert L. Packer
Contrasts a due-process model that treats the criminal process as an obstacle course protecting the accused with a crime-control model built for speed and finality, and shows real systems mix both.
Gross et al.
Compiles 340 documented American exonerations to show false confessions, mistaken eyewitnesses and forensic error recur across case types, and argues the true wrongful-conviction rate is far higher.
link checked 17 Sept 2026National Right to Counsel Committee
A national committee's own investigation finds public defence in the United States chronically underfunded and overloaded, so that the constitutional right to counsel is often only nominally honoured.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Francis Bowes Sayre
Traces mens rea from a single general moral-fault requirement into a fragmented set of specific mental elements attached to each offence, and argues the two uses are routinely confused.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael & Wechsler
Builds a grading scheme for homicide out of the actor's state of mind and the harm risked, supplying the analytic framework the Model Penal Code later adopted for murder and manslaughter.
Henry M. Hart Jr.
Sets out the purposes a criminal code should organise itself around — deterrence, correction, incapacitation and condemnation — and traces how they surface in the Model Penal Code's structure of offences.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George P. Fletcher
Traces how English and American theft law stretched larceny doctrine case by case to cover conduct it was never designed for, rather than admitting outright that the concept of theft had changed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sanford H. Kadish
Argues criminal excuses such as duress and insanity rest on one underlying principle — that the actor lacked a fair opportunity to conform to the law — rather than on unrelated separate doctrines.
Scott & Stuntz
Models plea bargains as contracts negotiated under sentencing-law defaults, explaining why bargains cluster near what a jury trial would likely produce rather than at arbitrary outcomes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Akhil Reed Amar
Argues the US Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure doctrine has drifted from the amendment's original focus on reasonableness and civil remedies into an incoherent, exclusionary-rule-centred mess.
link checked 17 Sept 2026