Alice Ristroph (Brooklyn Law School) has posted Read Thyself (Alabama Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
“What makes a crime violent?” I asked in 2011. “What is a ‘violent’ crime?” asks David Sklansky in A Pattern of Violence, a decade later. Over that decade, criminal law scholars, as well as political leaders, advocates, and activists outside the academy, have increasingly scrutinized the concept of violence in criminal law. There are a number of ways of investigating this issue, and a wide range of lessons one might take from the investigation. Amid this growing attention to violence, Sklansky’s approach is eerily similar to my own, until suddenly, it is not. As explained in this review essay, in reading Sklansky’s new book, I was—and was not—reading myself. An exploration of both the points of convergence and the points of departure between Sklansky’s work and my own may shed some light on the fate of radical critiques and the future of criminal law.
This has created quite a stir. I have not read Ristroph's 2011 paper or Sklansky's book; it would be inappropriate to comment on the issues raised by the review. I admire the work of both of these scholars.
