Böcker av Paul H. Robinson

Many aspects of modern life, from drug safety to fire codes, have come not from the sustained efforts of government bureaucrats but rather from the flash and sizzle of a tragic crime and the public outrage it provokes. This book is about those trigger crimes and how they have changed our world.

Containing 40 visually coded maps of the fifty states, this book offers an unprecedented look at America's diverse legal landscape.This first-of-its-kind volume sketches the diversity implicit in United States criminal law doctrine through its examination of a range of criminal laws pertaining to murder, sexual assault, drug offenses, the insanity defense, and more and the way in which different states deal with those issues. In addition to providing insights into the most widely invoked standards in criminal law, it raises awareness of the enormous discrepancies among the criminal laws of states, documenting them using dozens of visually coded maps that showcase geographic, political, and socioeconomic differences to explain patterns of agreement and disagreement. Mapping American Criminal Law: Variations Across the 50 States is for political scientists, criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars, policy advisors, legislators, lawyers, judges, and scholars and students of these fields. In addition, each chapter is highly accessible to laypersons and includes an explanation of the subject matter as well as explanations of the various approaches to criminal law taken by states.

It has long been held that humans need government to impose social order on a chaotic, dangerous world. How, then, did early humans survive on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators in a harsh and forbidding environment? Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers examines an array of natural experiments and accidents of human history to explore the fundamental nature of how human beings act when beyond the scope of the law. Pirates of the 1700s, the leper colony on Molokai Island, prisoners of the Nazis, hippie communes of the 1970s, shipwreck and plane crash survivors, and many more diverse groups¿they all existed in the absence of formal rules, punishments, and hierarchies. Paul and Sarah Robinson draw on these real-life stories to suggest that humans are predisposed to be cooperative, within limits.  What these ¿communities¿ did and how they managed have dramatic implications for shaping our modern institutions. Should today¿s criminal justice system build on people¿s shared intuitions about justice? Or are we better off acknowledging this aspect of human nature but using law to temper it? Knowing the true nature of our human character and our innate ideas about justice offers a roadmap to a better society.

High-profile crimes often prompt debate in newspapers, on TV or in coffee shops. This text presents a series of unusual episodes that challenge the law and defy knee-jerk verdicts. Readers are invited to provide judgement before the final outcome of the case is revealed.