A Road Map for the Consummate Traveller: The American Law of Sentencing
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Description
In the study of comparative penal law, voyages are less often physical than mental and emotional. To be sure, we make time for the mundane; just as we look to the Far East for rubber or spices, we in law look to other jurisdictions for new techniques that may help solve difficult doctrinal problems. But the lure of other legal systems, the fascination, lies elsewhere. It is the radical differentiation in points of view, the divergent assumptions about government, society and human behaviour, in short the novelty of the culture that draws and seduces us. Pity the poor traveler who returns from the Spice Islands with a chest full of leaves and stems, but no memory of unfamiliar peoples and behaviors, new and confounding rituals, or the dense, exotic feel of a different world. So too, the comparative lawyer, returned from a physical or mental investigation, will, if he is lucky, bring back not just useful implements but unsettling images of the alluring, the unfamiliar, the odd, and the incomprehensible.
Source Publication
Rede en recht: Opstellen ter gelegenheid van het afscheid van Prof. mr. N. Keijzer
Source Editors/Authors
G.J.M. Corstens, M.S. Groenhuijsen
Publication Date
2000
Recommended Citation
Schulhofer, Stephen J., "A Road Map for the Consummate Traveller: The American Law of Sentencing" (2000). Faculty Chapters. 1390.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1390
