Criminal Law Conversations

by Paul H. Robinson (Editor), Stephen P. Garvey (Editor), Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (Editor)

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.

768 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Paul Robinson is one of the world’s leading criminal law scholars. A former federal prosecutor and counsel for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures, he was the lone dissenter when the U.S. Sentencing Commission promulgated the current federal sentencing guidelines. Among his books are the standard lawyer’s reference on criminal law defenses, two Oxford monographs on criminal law theory, a highly regarded criminal law treatise, and an innovative case studies course book.

He is the lead editor of Criminal Law Conversations (Oxford, 2009), based on a 10-month online debate by more than 100 scholars from around the world, and author of Distributive Principles of Criminal Law: Who Should Be Punished How Much? (Oxford, 2008; also appearing in Spanish and Chinese). Robinson recently completed two criminal code reform projects in the United States and the first modern Islamic penal code under the auspices of the U.N. Development Program. He also writes for general audiences, including popular books such as Would You Convict? Seventeen Cases that Challenged the Law (NYU, 1999) and Law without Justice: Why Criminal Law Doesn’t Give People What They Deserve (Oxford, 2005).