That emotion should play a role in legal decision-making has been seen as inimical to the rule of law. Recent neuroscience research, however, has demonstrated that emotion plays a key role in legal decision-making, in particular the criminal law where personal, social, and moral circumstances are considered. The High Court recently considered judicial decision-making in Markarian v The Queen, p...

Feminism revolutionized criminology. Important issues were questioned within the feminist agenda, such as (in)equality in criminal justice system and disproportionate impact of imprisonment on women. In a scenario worldwide increasing female incarceration, gender-differentiated sentencing regimes have been discussed, aiming at reducing prison sentences. present study, we set out to answer follo...

The totality principle applies in cases of multiple offending to reduce the total effective sentence that is imposed on offenders. This is normally achieved by either making some or all of the individual sentences concurrent, or by reducing the length of the individual sentences. Although totality is a well-established sentencing doctrine, its scope and its impact on the overall sentence are un...

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the e ects of legal schools of thought on appellate jurisprudence and criminal sentencing decisions. We construct measures of the in uence of a major school of conservative legal thought Law and Economics using the linguistic features of judicial opinions and attendance at a law-and-economics training program. We examine the impact of law-and-econo...

Behavioral forecasts have informed parole decisions in the United States since the 1920’s (Borden, 1928; Burgess, 1928). Over the decades, these forecasts have increasingly relied on quantitative methods that some would call actuarial (Messinger and Berk, 1987; Feely and Simon, 1994). Despite jurisprudential concerns and forecasting accuracy that has been di cult to evaluate (Farrington, 2003; ...

In United States v. Booker, the Supreme Court held that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines are no longer mandatory, yet still instructed sentencing courts to continue to advise the Guidelines. In light of this expanded judicial discretion, post-Booker cooperation, or 5K1.1, motions made by the government are of particular interest because it can have the potential to increase the court’s power w...

Sentencing Commission (the " Commission "). I appreciate the opportunity to testify today about proposed changes to the federal sentencing guidelines for ecstasy trafficking in response to recently enacted legislation which was cosponsored by several members of the Caucus. As you know, the Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act (" the Act ") was enacted on October 17, 2000, and directs the Commission t...

In the Fall of 1989, I sat at a worn wooden desk with gum stuck to the bottom, listening to Professor Daniel Freed talk about the federal sentencing guidelines. I was captivated. Here, it seemed, there was a system of sentencing which demanded fairness, regularized punishment, and created a normative value for various wrongs. Professor Freed and virtually every other person in the room were str...