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The Collapse Of American Criminal Justice (2011)

by William J. Stuntz(Favorite Author)

4.13 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0674051750 (ISBN13: 9780674051751)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Belknap Press

review 1: I was disappointed. There's a lot of opinion-stated-as-fact, and also a lot of repitition. This book is 400+ pages, with 100 pages of notes and 300 pages of regular text. The 300 pages of regular text could be distilled into a twenty-page law review article. Most of the remaining 280 pages consists of the author repeating the same ideas over and over again.I was particularly interested to learn about the author's low opinion of police and prosecutor discretion. The book has some decent history and analysis of how discretion has changed over the years. But the part about why discretion is unjust is short on analysis and long on repitition of the author's conclusion. The internet says the author was a good law school teacher, and this book was published after he died... more, so maybe the repetition and vague sense of emptiness is a result of those who survived him trying to make a book-length argument out of what should have been an op-ed article.The internet also says the author went from law student to law clerk to law professor -- no mention of practice. One year out of every five of their careers, professors of criminal law and police detectives should trade places.
review 2: The book is informative and accessible to the non-lawyer. It was fascinating to learn the history of the development of criminal law in the US and to get to know the ways in which the current criminal justice system is very short on justice. My biggest complaint is that the book is endlessly repetitive -- as if it were originally a set of stand-alone articles. I found that to really distract from the book's ability to hold my interest. less

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