• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    Book Review: Harmfulness, Wrongfulness, Lesser Evils and Risk-Creation: A Comment on Douglas Husak’s Overcriminalization

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    Harmfulness__Wrongfulness__Les ...
    Size:
    560.3Kb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Yaffe, Gideon
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/3158
    Abstract
    Overcriminalization is a terrific book. It tackles a problem of great importance, given the staggering amount of punishment dealt out by the courts and evidenced in the overpopulation of prisons in the United States and elsewhere, at least some of which is unconscionably excessive, and the book offers very plausible proposals for limiting the creation of criminal law. It is an unabashedly normative book. Husak’s interest is in how law ought to be. But the book adopts none of the extremes of methodology that we find in much normative philosophy. The book does not attempt to derive constraints on criminal law from the fundamental principles of a previously accepted moral or political theory; it does not offer conditional arguments of the form “If you accept such-and-such moral or political theory (e.g. Kant’s, or Utilitarianism, or whatever), then you ought not to approve of prohibitions violating such-and-such constraints.” But nor does it start with intuitions about the unacceptability of particular criminal prohibitions or about the injustice of punishments of particular actual or hypothetical people and then rationalize those intuitions, post hoc, through appeal to general principles that systematize them. Rather, the book offers a range of different sorts of arguments for what might be called “mid-level principles”—principles that are too specific and narrow to serve as the axioms of a moral or political theory but are sufficiently general that they do not amount merely to intuitive pronouncements about particular prohibitions or particular cases. It seems to me that it is through appeal to such mid-level principles that we actually reason, and ought to reason, when we worry about normative problems, and so I think Husak has adopted exactly the right approach. He is neither in the bedrock nor in the sky, but on the surface where we all actually live.
    Collections
    Faculty Scholarship Series

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2023)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.