Redoing Criminal Law: Taking the Deviant Turn

Abstract

This is a review of Larry Alexander and Kim Ferzan’s Reflections on Crime and Culpability, a sequel to the authors’ Crime and Culpability. The two books set out a sweeping proposal for reforming our criminal law in ways that are at once commonsensical and mindbogglingly radical. But even if one is not on board with such a radical experiment, simply thinking it through holds many unexpected lessons: startlingly new insights about the current regime and about novel ways of doing legal theory, some of which are explored in this essay.