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Kolber blogging on the comparative nature of punishment

By Douglas A. Berman

Professor Adam Kolber has this new post at PrawfsBlawg talking about his new article, "The Comparative Nature of Punishment" (previously blogged here).  This new post concludes this way:The bottom line is this: If we seek to punish offenders in proportion to their blameworthiness, we need to sentence them in a manner that takes their baselines into account. If doing so is impossible or too expensive, then we must acknowledge that we are failing to punish offenders proportionally. Importantly, making such an acknowledgment forces retributivists to give up, to a large extent, on a very intuitively appealing notion of proportionality. It also shrinks the divide between retributivists and consequentialists. If I am correct, neither view punishes offenders according to an intuitively appealing concept of proportionality...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on October 01, 2008 (boomark / email).