Good, Evil, and Criminal Law: A Report from the Center for Ethics and Culture

As Marc mentioned the other day, the annual Fall Conference sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture is in full swing.  (It's always a wonderful event.)  I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of law-professor-Criminal-Law-profs, including our own Marc DeGirolami and Cecelia Klingele, and also MOJ-friends John Stinneford and Meghan Ryan.  It isn't always the case that multi-speaker panels actually cohere with each other, or with the panel's ostensible theme, but this one definitely did.

Meghan provided an overview and orientation of the various purposes and goals of punishment; John reflected on what exactly "punishment" is and the extent to which it is (or should be) connected to moral blameworthiness (and not merely social control); Marc discussed the different ways we have talked about, and talk about today, "evil" (with reference to, inter alia, Arent, Mill, and Stephen); and Cecelia rounded things out with some cautionary notes about the moves in Criminal Law and corrections in the direction of algorithm-driven risk-assessment and big-data-dependent predictive policing.  A good time was had by all!