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A must-read for all would-be sentencing reformers

By Douglas A. Berman

Though the paper does not mention sentencing once, this new work soon to be published in the Cornell Law Review is a must-read for any and all would-be sentencing reformers. The piece is titled, "Blinking on the Bench: How Judges Decide Cases," and here are excerpts:In this Article, we argue and attempt to demonstrate that neither the formalists nor the realists accurately describe the way judges make decisions, but that key insights from each form the core of a more accurate model. We propose a blend of the two that we call the "intuitive-override" model of judging.  Supported by contemporary psychological research on the human mind and by our own empirical evidence, this model posits that judges generally make intuitive decisions but sometimes override their intuition with deliberation...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).