Double issue of Federal Sentencing Reporter devoted to "Frankel at 50" now online

Regular readers likely recall some of my posts from earlier this year discussing the event in New York City this past April titled "Frankel at 50: A Half-Century’s Perspective on Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order."    As mentioned in a prior post, though this event was only in-person, we also solicited a big set of article for a "Frankel at 50" special double issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter.  I am now pleased to report that this special double issue has now been published, and I am so proud of what can be found inside.

This new "Frankel at 50" FSR issue has more than a dozen original articles from many judges and leading academics and advocates, a handful of great past FSR pieces from leading federal judges that very much merited reprinting in this collection, and also a set of archival materials that capture the voice of Judge Marvin Frankel in various ways.  Professor Steve Chanenson and I authored an introduction to the collection, titled "Frankel at 50: A Half-Century’s Perspective on Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order," and here is its abstract:

Fifty years ago, Judge Marvin E. Frankel published a slim volume that has had an outsized and enduring impact on the criminal justice system in the United States and around the globe.  In Criminal Sentences: Law without Order, Frankel captured the public’s imagination and the legal establishment’s attention in a way that is scarcely comprehensible in today’s world full of copious (but typically unheeded) criminal justice scholarship and policy advocacy.  Judge Frankel’s work serves as a kind of a sentencing Rorschach Test for those involved in sentencing discussions and debates past and present. Because the book is so rich, and because the text is both a reflection of its times and still timeless, people can — and do — see lots of different things in Criminal Sentences: Law without Order.  This essay, stemming from an April 2023 conference commemorating the book’s golden anniversary, explores the role that Frankel and his book had in shaping modern sentencing discourse and what lessons they offer for the future.

Check it all out.