University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 2-10-2021 Criminal Law’s Core Principles Paul H. Robinson University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Law and Society Commons, Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, and the Social Policy Commons Repository Citation Robinson, Paul H., "Criminal Law’s Core Principles" (2021). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 2251. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2251 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 2 10 21 CRIMINAL LAW’S CORE PRINCIPLES Paul H. Robinson* Abstract Modern criminal law scholars and policymakers assume they are free to construct criminal law rules by focusing exclusively on the criminal justice theory of the day. But this “blank slate” conception of criminal lawmaking is dangerously misguided. In fact, lawmakers are writing on a slate on which core principles are already indelibly written and realistically they are free only to add detail in the implementation of those principles and to add additional provisions not inconsistent with them. Attempts to do otherwise are destined to produce tragic results from both utilitarian and retributivist views.