Black Letter on Criminal Law covers the subject of Criminal Law with attention to the issues most often covered in most professors? Criminal Law classes. It is an excellent companion to Dressler's well-respected and popular casebook, Cases and Materials on Criminal Law (now in its third edition), also published by West, but will work seamlessly with all the other major criminal law casebooks. The general part of the criminal law'the elements of offenses, defenses to crimes, inchoate conduct, and complicity'are covered in doctrinal and theoretical depth, with separate attention to both the common law and Model Penal Code. The major crimes (murder, manslaughter, rape and related sexual offenses, and the theft crimes) are also fully developed. Black Letter on Criminal Law is also designed with features that will be especially useful for first-year students. At the beginning and often within each Part of the Black Letter, Professor Dressler conducts ?Conversations with Students? in which he talks to student-readers in an informal way, much as a professor might do at the beginning of a class, to better prepare students for what follows. Second, near the beginning of the Black Letter, Professor Dressler brings his personal experiences as a student and his nearly thirty years in law teaching and examination-grading to bear on examination-taking, by clearly and, at times humorously, discussing the ?Do's and Don'ts in Essay Examination-Taking.' Of course, as with all Black Letters, he provides examination and study questions'multiple choice, short answer, and essay'with accompanying answers.

Demonstrates how social norms and beliefs influence the outcomes in certain criminal cases.

A vital collection for reforming criminal justice After five decades of punitive expansion, the entire U.S. criminal justice system— mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, police practices, the treatment of juveniles and the mentally ill, glaring racial disparity, the death penalty and more — faces challenging questions. What exactly is criminal justice? How much of it is a system of law and how much is a collection of situational social practices? What roles do the Constitution and the Supreme Court play? How do race and gender shape outcomes? How does change happen, and what changes or adaptations should be pursued? The New Criminal Justice Thinking addresses the challenges of this historic moment by asking essential theoretical and practical questions about how the criminal system operates. In this thorough and thoughtful volume, scholars from across the disciplines of legal theory, sociology, criminology, Critical Race Theory, and organizational theory offer crucial insights into how the criminal system works in both theory and practice. By engaging both classic issues and new understandings, this volume offers a comprehensive framework for thinking about the modern justice system. For those interested in criminal law and justice, The New Criminal Justice Thinking offers a profound discussion of the complexities of our deeply flawed criminal justice system, complexities that neither legal theory nor social science can answer alone.

Even for violent crime, justice should mean more than punishment. By paying close attention to the relational harms suffered by victims, this book develops a concept of relational justice for survivors, offenders and community. Relational justice looks beyond traditional rules of legal responsibility to include the social and emotional dimensions of human experience, opening the way for a more compassionate, effective and just response to crime. The book’s chapters follow a journey from victim experiences of violence to community healing from violence. Early chapters examine the relational harms inflicted by the worst wrongs, the moral responsibility of wrongdoers and common mistakes made in judging wrongdoing. Particular attention is paid here to sexual violence. The book then moves to questions of just punishment: proper sentencing by judges, mandatory sentences approved by the public, and the realities of contemporary incarceration, focusing particularly on solitary confinement and sexual violence. In its remaining chapters, the book looks at changes brought by the victims' rights movement and victim needs that current law does not, and perhaps cannot meet. It then addresses possibilities for offender change and challenges for majority America in addressing race discrimination in criminal justice. The book concludes with a look at how individuals might live out the ideals of a greater—relational—justice. Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Interrogates conventional assumptions and frames a transformational new way of thinking about law, language, moral judgments, politics, and transgressive art - especially profane genres like gangsta rap - and exposes where racial bias lives in the administration of justice and everyday life