CHARLES MCCLAIN
DAN M. KAHAN
See also CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: LEGAL ASPECTS; CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: MORALITY, POLITICS, AND POLICY; CRIME COMMISSIONS; JUVENILE JUSTICE: HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY; PRISONS: HISTORY.
It is an incontrovertible fact that the law of crimes has historically suffered from a kind of malign neglect in America. In other branches of the law, from the beginning there has been a tradition of willingness, if not eagerness, on the part of judges, legislators, and legal commentators to examine basic premises and to promote doctrinal change if they thought society required it. But the dom…
The New England colonies. It is appropriate to begin a discussion of the history of criminal law reform with the colonial period since that era witnessed the first efforts at improvement. All of the American colonies drew principally on the jurisprudence and laws of the mother country in fashioning their criminal law. Obviously, small bands of colonial settlers, few of them with any legal training…
The American Revolution stimulated several forays in the direction of criminal law reform, all of them interesting for the new attitudes toward punishment that they revealed, although only one produced any long-term results. In the aftermath of the break with Great Britain, the newly independent colonies all faced the question of how much of the mother country's law they wished to retain. Some pat…
The passage of the statute on the degrees of murder took much of the wind out of the sails of the Pennsylvania movement for the complete abolition of capital punishment. The movement remained quiescent for several decades but was to revive again in the 1820s as part of a larger anticapital-punishment crusade that flourished on the national scene roughly between 1820 and 1850. This discussion will …
The second half of the nineteenth century was not marked by any great ferment in the field of substantive penal law reform. American lawyers and legislators were by and large preoccupied with other matters during this era of industrialization and commercial expansion. One notable exception to the rule, however, was the effort mounted in New York and presided over by David Dudley Field to completel…
In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, a dynamic, complex social reform movement known as Progressivism swept through the middle and upper sectors of American society. The Progressives were a varied lot, and they had a varied political and social agenda. But among their chief aims were the elimination of corruption from politics, the introduction of ef…
By the 1920s, attention had shifted from improving the techniques of rehabilitating the individual offender to the control of criminal behavior in the aggregate. This was the period of the great national experiment of Prohibition, with its attendant rise in illegalities of all sorts. Citizens across the land, but especially in large cities, became increasingly agitated at what they perceived to be…
American Law Institute. Model Penal Code: Proposed Official Draft. Philadelphia: ALI, 1962. "Colony of New Plymouth: Laws of 1636." The Compact with the Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth. Edited by William Brigham. Boston: Dutton & Wentworth, 1836, pp. 35?57. "Constitution of Pennsylvania, 1790." The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the Sta…
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