Locating the Judge within Sentencing Research

Research into sentencing is undertaken from a range of theoretical, disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Each approach offers valuable insights, including a conception of the judge, sometimes explicit, often implicit. Little scholarly attention has been paid to directly interrogating the ways in which different research traditions construct the judge in the sentencing process. By investigating how different research approaches locate the judge as an actor in sentencing, theoretically and empirically, this article addresses that gap. It considers key examples of socio-legal scholarship which emphasise the judge as operating within experiential, emotional and social, as well as legal dimensions. This growing body of research offers a more social, relational and interactive understanding of the judge in sentencing, extending and complementing the valuable, but necessarily limited, insights of other research approaches about the place of the judge in sentencing

Locating the Judge within Sentencing Research

Research into sentencing is undertaken from a range of theoretical, disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Each approach offers valuable insights, including a conception of the judge, sometimes explicit, often implicit. Little scholarly attention has been paid to directly interrogating the ways in which different research traditions construct the judge in the sentencing process. By investigating how different research approaches locate the judge as an actor in sentencing, theoretically and empirically, this article addresses that gap. It considers key examples of socio-legal scholarship which emphasise the judge as operating within experiential, emotional and social, as well as legal dimensions. This growing body of research offers a more social, relational and interactive understanding of the judge in sentencing, extending and complementing the valuable, but necessarily limited, insights of other research approaches about the place of the judge in sentencing

Supporting discretionary decision-making with information technology

A NUMBER OF INCREASINGLY SOPHISTICATED technologies are now being used to support complex decision-making in a range of contexts. This paper reports on a project undertaken to provide decision support in discretionary legal domains by referring to a recently created model that involves the interplay and weighting of relevant rule-based and discretionary factors used in a decision-making process. The case study used in the modelling process is the Criminal Jurisdiction of the Victorian Magistrate’s Court (Australia), where the handing down of an appropriate custodial or non-custodial sentence requires the consideration of many factors. Tools and techniques used to capture relevant expert knowledge and to display it both as a paper model and as an online prototype application are discussed. Models of sentencing decision-making with rule-based and discretionary elements are presented and analyzed. This paper concludes by discussing the benefits and disadvantages of such technology and considers some potential appropriate uses of the model and web-based prototype application.C