Review of W. Stuntz: The Collapse of American Criminal Justice

Abstract

It is often said that facts are revolutionary. With their power to burn off the ideological mists that obscure our political vision, and to remind us of the unanticipated and sometimes negative consequences of our most well-meaning actions, facts can shake our views on matters great and small, dishing out intellectual therapy to the benighted and the bemused. The legal scholar William Stuntz, who died last year of cancer at fifty-two, was a master practitioner of this brand of therapy, filling his writings with counterintuitive observations in order to lay bare the weaknesses of a legal system he viewed as deeply flawed. To his scholarship he brought intellectual integrity, a profound sense of justice, and vision. His final book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, crowns an intellectual trajectory that very few have equaled.

Keywords: Criminal Justice, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Democracy and Punishment