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Can and should we try to research sentencing law and policy in actual laboratories?

By Douglas A. Berman

Especially in the context of criminal justice reform, I love Justice Louis Brandies' notion of state legislatures serving as "laboratories of democracy" for improving national crime and punishment law and policies.  However, the question in the title of this post asks whether actual laboratories might allow us to better understand crime and punishment, and it is inspired by this new paper on SSRN titled "Using Laboratory Experiments to Study Law and Crime." Here is the abstract: The 19th and 20th centuries produced breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, and the biological sciences. Laboratory research played an important role in the rapid advances made in these fields.  Laboratory research can also contribute progress in the social sciences and, in particular, to law and criminology...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on September 02, 2010 (boomark / email).