Teaching Holistic Sentencing

Abstract

Wake Forest University School of Law. On the surface, sentencing guidelines have changed the way teachers introduce their students to sentencing. Before guidelines, with few legal building blocks, teachers necessarily discussed sentencing purposes and principles. After the promulgation of sentencing guidelines, teachers' needs have shifted, into a mode of introducing and manipulating the new sentencing rules. When there are specific rules to apply and when applying them correctly takes some practice, this view holds, trying to teach sentencing theory will only distract students or fritter away time on questions already settled. We believe the separation between the teaching of sentencing rules and the teaching of sentencing principles is a false split. While a person can be instructed about sentencing rules and how to apply them to particular facts, any effort to teach sentencing requires the student (be she a judge, lawyer, probation officer, law school student, or citizen) to consider ideas of justice and process. When the subject is sentencing guidelines, thoughtful teachers must enable their students to analyze critically some particular guidelines provisions and the system as a whole. Students should have a sense of the historical origins of particular sentencing rules. They should be able to anticipate the likely effects of sentencing rules, identify distinctive responses to recurring sentencing problems, and argue for more just and effective alternatives to the current rules. Finally, they must understand sentencing as an integrated whole, rather than a sequence of parts.