Response

Realism, Punishment, and Reform

Paul H. Robinson

Colin S. Diver Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Owen D. Jones

New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law and Professor of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University; Director, MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project

Robert Kurzban

Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania

The discussion here concerns the ideas set out in three articles, each with a different set of coauthors: Concordance and Conflict in Intuitions of Justice (“C&C”), The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (“Origins”), and Intuitions of Justice: Implications for Criminal Law and Justice Policy (“Implications”). Those pieces were an attempt to change the way legal scholars think about intuitions of justice. Professors Donald Braman, Dan Kahan, and David Hoffman (“BKH”) offer some criticisms. Some we do not disagree with. Others we do.

We concede at the start that our past discussions must have been insufficiently careful in their language, as evidenced by the fact that BKH have misread us as they have. We are in BKH’s debt for having revealed the problem. (We also thank them for their true generosity in supporting us in our discussions with the Law Review about writing this Response, and thereby giving us the opportunity to make our positions clear.)

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