Deep thoughts about sentencing, sentencing rules, and sentencing rule-making

I just came across these two interesting new papers on SSRN that raise lots of interesting and deep thoughts about both sentencing outcomes and sentencing rules and sentencing decision-making:

Confronting Political Disagreement About Sentencing: A Deliberative Democratic Framework by Seth Mayer & Italia Patti

Abstract:  There is broad agreement that the American criminal sentencing system is deeply flawed, yet current theoretical frameworks for sentencing have failed to offer a way forward for reform.  These frameworks have not faced up to political disagreement. Instead, they either try to impose disputed moral theories or they downplay normative considerations and seek to impose numerically consistent, rather than normatively justified, sentences. The failures of both approaches are in evidence in the process that led to the development of the United States Sentencing Guidelines.

This Article is the first to offer a framework to directly and effectively confront political disagreement.  It draws on deliberative democratic conceptions of legitimacy to develop a framework for sentencing that addresses disagreement.  Deliberative democracy offers a normatively grounded approach to managing disagreement through collective reasoning, which aims to place the legal system under public control.  This Article articulates criteria for evaluating legal systems from the perspective of a particular conception of deliberative democratic legitimacy and offers reforms to enable the current system to better embody those criteria.

Rules, Standards, Sentencing, and the Nature of Law by Russell Covey

Abstract:  Sentencing law and practice in the United States can be characterized as an argument about rules and standards.  Whereas in the decades prior to the 1980s when sentencing was largely a discretionary activity governed only by broad sentencing standards, a sentencing reform movement in the 1980s transformed sentencing practice through the advent of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum provisions.  As a result, sentencing became far less standard-like and far more rule-like. Although reform proponents believed that this "rulification" of sentencing would reduce unwarranted sentencing disparities and enhance justice, it is far from clear that these goals were achieved. Indeed, the debate between sentencing reformers and their critics is a paradigmatic illustration of the limits of relying upon modifications of legal form to enhance substantive justice.

Building upon the work of legal theorists who have considered the rules versus standards conundrum, this article uses sentencing law as a lens to view some of the fundamental perplexities that bedevil law's grander aspirations -- for determinacy, fairness, even coherence itself.  Because, it is argued, refinements in legal form will never achieve the substantive goals to which law strives, the Essay urges a turn away from formal equality and toward a conception of sentencing justice that is centered on process values such as respect for those affected by sentencing decisions, concern that all voices be adequately heard, and decision making that reflects the considered moral judgment of the decision maker.