Green & Kugler on Community Perceptions of Theft Seriousness

Professor Stuart P. Green of the Rutgers University School of Law–Newark, and Dr. Matthew B. Kugler of the Lehigh University Department of Psychology, have published Community Perceptions of Theft Seriousness: A Challenge to Model Penal Code and English Theft Act Consolidation, 7 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies No. 3, pages 511-537 (2010). Here is the abstract:

In the middle of the 20th century, criminal law reformers helped pass laws that consolidated previously distinct common-law offenses such as larceny, embezzlement, false pretenses, extortion, blackmail, and receiving stolen property into a unified offense of theft, imposing uniform punishments for a diversity of methods of stealing and a diversity of types of property that could be stolen. The result was a “consolidated” scheme of theft, with a single, broad definition of property (typically, “anything of value”) and a single scheme of grading (based, roughly, on the value of the thing stolen). In this study, participants were given two sets of scenarios—one involving variations in the means by which a theft was committed, the other involving variations in the type of property stolen—and asked to rate these thefts in terms of blameworthiness and punishment deserved. They drew sharp distinctions across both means of theft and type of property, not adopting a consolidated view. Under the principle of fair labeling—the idea that criminal law offenses should be divided and labeled so as to represent widely felt views about the nature and magnitude of law breaking—such data provide the basis for a significant challenge to modern theft law.

Tags: Legal ontologies, Legal knowledge representation, Criminal law information systems, Legal communication, Empirical methods in legal informatics, Empirical methods in legal communication studies, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Stuart P. Green, Matthew B. Kugler, Offenses, Categorization of criminal offenses, Criminal offenses, Fair labeling of criminal offenses, Public perception of criminal offenses, Theft, Public perception of the seriousness of criminal offenses, Public perception of categories of criminal offenses