This coursebook offers an exciting new approach to teaching criminal law to graduate and undergraduate students, and indeed to the general public. Each well-organized and student-friendly chapter offers historical context, tells the story of a principal historic case, provides a modern case that contrasts with the historic, explains the legal issue at the heart of both cases, includes a unique mapping feature describing the range of positions on the issue among the states today, examines a key policy question on the topic, and provides an aftermath that reports the final chapter to the historic and modern case stories. By embedding sophisticated legal doctrine and analysis in real-world storytelling, the book provides a uniquely effective approach to teaching American criminal law in programs on criminal justice, political science, public policy, history, philosophy, and a range of other fields.

This volume presents new research in artificial intelligence (AI) and Law with special reference to criminal justice. It brings together leading international experts including computer scientists, lawyers, judges and cyber-psychologists. The book examines some of the core problems that technology raises for criminal law ranging from privacy and data protection, to cyber-warfare, through to the theft of virtual property. Focusing on the West and China, the work considers the issue of AI and the Law in a comparative context presenting the research from a cross-jurisdictional and cross-disciplinary approach. As China becomes a global leader in AI and technology, the book provides an essential in-depth understanding of domestic laws in both Western jurisdictions and China on criminal liability for cybercrime. As such, it will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of AI, technology and criminal justice.

This book examines shared intuitive notions of justice among laypersons and compares the discovered principles to those instantiated in American criminal codes. It reports eighteen original studies on a wide range of issues that are central to criminal law formulation.

Drafters of legal codes often implicitly or explicitly seek to incorporate community standards. To what extent have they succeeded? This book examines shared intuitive notions of justice among laypersons and compares the discovered principles to those instantiated in current American criminal codes. After discussion of the proper role of community views in formulating legal doctrine, Robinson and Darley report eighteen original studies on a wide range of issues in dispute among legal theorists. The authors compare lay intuitions and code provisions on such questions as the justified use of force, insanity, causation, complicity, risk-creation, omission liability, culpability requirements, duress, entrapment, multiple offenses, and criminalization matters such as felony-murder and sexual offenses. Many important differences between the legal code and community views are found, and the authors discuss the implications of those differences. One implication is the possibility that such conflicts could lead to reduced compliance as the code loses its moral authority with the community.

This volume presents new research in artificial intelligence (AI) and Law with special reference to criminal justice. It brings together leading international experts including computer scientists, lawyers, judges and cyber-psychologists. The book examines some of the core problems that technology raises for criminal law ranging from privacy and data protection, to cyber-warfare, through to the theft of virtual property. Focusing on the West and China, the work considers the issue of AI and the Law in a comparative context presenting the research from a cross-jurisdictional and cross-disciplinary approach. As China becomes a global leader in AI and technology, the book provides an essential in-depth understanding of domestic laws in both Western jurisdictions and China on criminal liability for cybercrime. As such, it will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of AI, technology and criminal justice.

"A thought-provoking book on how accurately criminal law and its application reflect our sense of justice...an excellent text."
--Barry N. Sweet, "The Law and Politics Book Review"

A police trooper inspects a car during a routine traffic stop and finds a vast cache of weapons, complete with automatic rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and black ski masks-a veritable bank robber's kit. Should the men in the car be charged? If so, with what?

A son neglects to care for his elderly mother, whose emaciated form is discovered shortly before she dies a painful death. Is the son's neglect punishable, and if so how?

A career con man writes one bad check too many and is sentenced to life in prison-for a check in the amount of $129.75. Is this just?

A thief steals a backpack, only to find it contains a terrorist bomb. He alerts the police and saves lives, transforming himself from petty criminal to national hero.

These are just a few of the many provocative cases that Paul Robinson presents and unravels in Would You Convict?

Judging crimes and meting out punishment has long been an informal national pasttime. High-profile crimes or particularly brutal ones invariably prompt endless debate, in newspapers, on television, in coffee shops, and on front porches. Our very nature inclines us to be armchair judges, freely waving our metaphorical gavels and opining as to the innocence or guilt-and suitable punishment-of alleged criminals.

Confronting this impulse, Paul Robinson here presents a series of unusual episodes that not only challenged the law, but that defy a facile or knee-jerk verdict. Narrating the facts in compelling, but detached detail, Robinson invitesreaders to sentence the transgressor (or not), before revealing the final outcome of the case.

The cases described in Would You Convict? engage, shock, even repel. Without a doubt, they will challenge you and your belief system. And the way in which juries and judges have resolved them will almost certainly surprise you.

This book focuses on the role of the psychiatric, medical and nutritional assessment and management of severely ill patients with anorexia and bulimia nervosa. Lead clinicians and researchers address the essentials of risk assessment, the identification of complications and the monitoring of treatment progress. Location of care and the role of the team are fully addressed, with due consideration of legal and ethical issues. Practical guidelines are included on risk assessment, management of acute and chronic physical problems, feeding during treatment and consent, as outlined in the MARSIPAN (2010) and Junior MARSIPAN (2012)documents. Assessment and Management of Medical Problems in Eating Disorders will be of value for GPs, psychiatrists, medical teams and all health-care professionals involved in the treatment and management of anorexia and bulimia nervosa and related eating disorders. "

This volume brings together a collection of essays, many of them scholarly classics, which form part of the debates on three questions central to criminal law theory. The first of these questions is: what conduct should be necessary for criminal liability, and what sufficient? The answer to this question has wider implications for the debate about morality enforcement given the concern that the 'harm principle' may have collapsed under its own weight. Secondly, essays address the question of what culpability should be necessary for criminal liability, and what sufficient? Here, the battles continue over whether the formulation of doctrines - such as the insanity defense, criminal negligence, strict liability, and others - should ignore or minimize the extent of an offender's blameworthiness in the name of effective crime-control. Or, are methods of accommodating the tension now in sight? Finally, essays consider the question of how criminal law rules should be best organized into a coherent and clarifying doctrinal structure. The structure grown by the common law process competes not only with that of modern comprehensive codifications, such as the America Law Institute's Model Penal Code, but also with alternative structures imagined but not yet tried.

It has long been a commonly shared wisdom that humans need government to bring social order to what would otherwise be a chaotic and dangerous world. But recent thinking suggests that governmental law is not the wellspring of social order--after all, thousands of years ago early humans on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators, had no government or law yet produced the most successful species in the history of the planet. Presumably they found ways to cooperate and survive what was a harsh and forbidding environment. Does modern man retain this same cooperative inclination, or has it atrophied in humans' modern conditions? Living Beyond the Law: Lessons from Pirates, Prisoners, Lepers, and Survivors mines the amazing natural experiments and accidents of modern human history: shipwrecks, plane crashes, leper colonies, pirate crews, escaped slaves, Gold Rush prospectors, prison uprisings, utopian hippie communes, Nazi concentration camps, and a host of other situations in which modern man has been thrown into a situation beyond the reach of law, to explore the fundamental nature of human beings and how we act when we don't necessarily have to behave. History is rife with examples of how people perform when rules of civility collapse and here, Sarah and Paul Robinson explain that humans in such situations are neither devils nor angels. The real stories included in this book show that modern individuals naturally incline toward reasonable action, even in desperate conditions where survival is at issue. Applying insights from psychology, biology, political science, and social science to these historical and contemproary examples demonstrates that an innate cooperative spirit prevails only in the presence of a system to punish serious wrongdoing within the group and only when that punishment is perceived as just. Living Beyond the Law provides an optimistic picture of human nature--wherein humans are predisposed to be cooperative within limits--that is essential to understanding our contemporary society and to formulate modern criminal law and policy.

Research suggests that people of all demographics have nuanced and sophisticated notions of justice. In this intriguing new book, Paul H. Robinson demonstrates that judicial decisions that deviate from public conceptions of justice and desert can seriously undermine the American criminal justice system's integrity and legitimacy by failing to recognize or meet the needs of the communities it serves. Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert sketches the contours of a wide range of lay conceptions of justice, touching many if not most of the issues that penal code drafters or policy makers must face, including normative crime control, universal understandings of justice, culpability, principles of adjudication, grading sentencing, justification defenses, and judicial discretion. Robinson warns that compromising the American criminal justice system to satisfy other interests can uncover hidden the costs incurred when a community's notions about justice are not reflected in its criminal laws. By ignoring the intuitions of justice held by the communities they serve, legislators, policymakers, and judges undermine the relevance of the criminal justice system and reduce its strength and legitimacy, creating a gap between what justice a community needs and what justice a court or law prescribes.

This title makes complex criminal law issues more accessible to students by examining the facts of real-life case studies. The new edition continues the practice of adding additional cases, along with all accompanying material. Included in the text are details regarding the offender's background, the nature of the offense, all relevant facts of the case, photographs of the people and locations of the offense, and the texts of both then-governing and current statutes. This approach encourages analysis about what the law is and should be, and the aftermath of each case encourages discussion about what actually happened to the defendant and why.

Containing 40 visually coded maps of the fifty states, this book offers an unprecedented look at America's diverse legal landscape. This first-of-its-kind volume sketches the diversity implicit in United States criminal law doctrine through its examination of a range of criminal laws pertaining to murder, sexual assault, drug offenses, the insanity defense, and more and the way in which different states deal with those issues. In addition to providing insights into the most widely invoked standards in criminal law, it raises awareness of the enormous discrepancies among the criminal laws of states, documenting them using dozens of visually coded maps that showcase geographic, political, and socioeconomic differences to explain patterns of agreement and disagreement. Mapping American Criminal Law: Variations Across the 50 States is for political scientists, criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars, policy advisors, legislators, lawyers, judges, and scholars and students of these fields. In addition, each chapter is highly accessible to laypersons and includes an explanation of the subject matter as well as explanations of the various approaches to criminal law taken by states. Reflects the expertise of one of America's most-cited experts in criminal law, coauthor Paul H. Robinson, and is informed by the legal experience of coauthor Tyler Scot Williams Contains important new research on dozens of the most important issues in criminal law Includes 40 visually coded maps that provide an instant picture of the striking diversity in criminal law among states

Criminal Law Conversations provides an authoritative overview of contemporary criminal law debates in the United States. This collection of high caliber scholarly papers was assembled using an innovative and interactive method of nominations and commentary by the nation's top legal scholars. Virtually every leading scholar in the field has participated, resulting in a volume of interest to those both in and outside of the community. Criminal Law Conversations showcases the most captivating of these essays, and provides insight into the most fundamental and provocative questions of modern criminal law.

"A thought-provoking book on how accurately criminal law and its application reflect our sense of justice...an excellent text."
--Barry N. Sweet, "The Law and Politics Book Review"

A police trooper inspects a car during a routine traffic stop and finds a vast cache of weapons, complete with automatic rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and black ski masks-a veritable bank robber's kit. Should the men in the car be charged? If so, with what?

A son neglects to care for his elderly mother, whose emaciated form is discovered shortly before she dies a painful death. Is the son's neglect punishable, and if so how?

A career con man writes one bad check too many and is sentenced to life in prison-for a check in the amount of $129.75. Is this just?

A thief steals a backpack, only to find it contains a terrorist bomb. He alerts the police and saves lives, transforming himself from petty criminal to national hero.

These are just a few of the many provocative cases that Paul Robinson presents and unravels in Would You Convict?

Judging crimes and meting out punishment has long been an informal national pasttime. High-profile crimes or particularly brutal ones invariably prompt endless debate, in newspapers, on television, in coffee shops, and on front porches. Our very nature inclines us to be armchair judges, freely waving our metaphorical gavels and opining as to the innocence or guilt-and suitable punishment-of alleged criminals.

Confronting this impulse, Paul Robinson here presents a series of unusual episodes that not only challenged the law, but that defy a facile or knee-jerk verdict. Narrating the facts in compelling, but detached detail, Robinson invitesreaders to sentence the transgressor (or not), before revealing the final outcome of the case.

The cases described in Would You Convict? engage, shock, even repel. Without a doubt, they will challenge you and your belief system. And the way in which juries and judges have resolved them will almost certainly surprise you.

If an innocent person is sent to prison or if a killer walks free, we are outraged. The legal system assures us, and we expect and demand, that it will seek to "do justice" in criminal cases. So why, for some cases, does the criminal law deliberately and routinely sacrifice justice? In this unflinching look at American criminal law, Paul Robinson and Michael Cahill demonstrate that cases with unjust outcomes are not always irregular or unpredictable. Rather, the criminal law sometimes chooses not to give defendants what they deserve: that is, unsatisfying results occur even when the system works as it is designed to work. The authors find that while some justice-sacrificing doctrines serve their intended purpose, many others do not, or could be replaced by other, better rules that would serve the purpose without abandoning a just result. With a panoramic view of the overlapping and often competing goals that our legal institutions must balance on a daily basis, Law without Justice challenges us to restore justice to the criminal justice system.

Professor Robinson provides a new critique of the often neglected problem of classification within the criminal law. He presents a discussion of the present conceptual framework of the law, and offers explanations of how and why formal structures do not match the operation of law in practice. In this scholarly exposition of applied criminal theory, Robinson argues that the current operational structure of the criminal law fails to take account of its different functions. He goes on to suggest new sample codes of criminal conduct and criminal adjudication which mark a real departure from the pragmatic approach which presently dominates code-making. This rounded exploration of the structure of systems of criminal law is an important work for law teachers and policy makers world-wide.