Law, Psychology & Morality

In a democratic society, law is an important means to express, manipulate, and enforce moral codes. Demonstrating empirically that law can achieve moral goals is difficult. Nevertheless, public interest groups spend considerable energy and resources to change the law with the goal of changing not only morally-laden behaviors, but also morally-laden cognitions and emotions. Additionally, even when there is little reason to believe that a change in law will lead to changes in behavior or attitudes, groups see the law as a form of moral capital that they wish to own, to make a statement about society. Examples include gay sodomy laws, abortion laws, and Prohibition. In this Chapter, we explore the possible mechanisms by which law can influence attitudes and behavior. To this end, we consider informational and group influence of law on attitudes, as well as the effects of salience, coordination, and social meaning on behavior, and the behavioral backlash that can result from a mismatch between law and community attitudes. Finally, we describe two lines of psychological research—symbolic politics and group identity— that can help explain how people use the law, or the legal system, to effect expressive goals

What\u27s Wrong with Harmless Theories of Punishment

We maintain that conventional punishment theories obscure what is virtually always at the heart of punishment policy debates: harm. Namely, punishment policy disputes reflect contested views about what the harms inflicted by crime are as an empirical matter, and whether these harms ought to be acknowledged by the criminal justice regime as a normative matter. We argue that in order to know who, what, and how much to punish, one must take a position about what the harms of crime actually are. However, conventional punishment theories are mute on this question. When they supply an answer, it is because they have relied on a source outside the boundaries of their own theory to tell us why one crime is worse than another. We contend that discarding harmless theories of punishment, and instead focusing directly on competing views about the harms of crime, would clarify policy debates and open up possibilities for creative, pluralistic solutions to criminal justice problems. In addition to specifying in some detail what the harms of crime are, we offer two examples of how specific punishment policy debates would look different if they focused on harms instead of punishment theories. We also offer an illustration of a punishment policy originally motivated not by punishment theory but by a desire to explicitly address the multiple and particular harms of crime: restorative justice

What\u27s Wrong with Harmless Theories of Punishment

We maintain that conventional punishment theories obscure what is virtually always at the heart of punishment policy debates: harm. Namely, punishment policy disputes reflect contested views about what the harms inflicted by crime are as an empirical matter, and whether these harms ought to be acknowledged by the criminal justice regime as a normative matter. We argue that in order to know who, what, and how much to punish, one must take a position about what the harms of crime actually are. However, conventional punishment theories are mute on this question. When they supply an answer, it is because they have relied on a source outside the boundaries of their own theory to tell us why one crime is worse than another. We contend that discarding harmless theories of punishment, and instead focusing directly on competing views about the harms of crime, would clarify policy debates and open up possibilities for creative, pluralistic solutions to criminal justice problems. In addition to specifying in some detail what the harms of crime are, we offer two examples of how specific punishment policy debates would look different if they focused on harms instead of punishment theories. We also offer an illustration of a punishment policy originally motivated not by punishment theory but by a desire to explicitly address the multiple and particular harms of crime: restorative justice

White paper of democratic criminal justice

This white paper is the joint product of nineteen professors of criminal law and procedure who share a common conviction: that the path toward a more just, effective, and reasonable criminal system in the United States is todemocratizeAmerican criminal justice. In the name of the movement to democratize criminal justice, we herein set forth thirty proposals for democratic criminal justice reform.Additional co-authors: Jonathan Simon, Jocelyn Simonson, Tom R. Tyler, Ekow N. Yanka