Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2015
Abstract
Using stories from the 1848-1851 California gold miners, the 1851 San Francisco vigilante committees, Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s, and wagon trains of American westward migration in the 1840s, the chapter illustrates that it is part of human nature to see doing justice as a value in itself—in people’s minds it is not dependent for justification on the practical benefits it brings. Having justice done is sufficiently important to people that they willingly suffer enormous costs to obtain it, even when they were neither hurt by the wrong nor in a position to benefit from punishing the wrongdoer.
This is Chapter 4 from the general audience book Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the Law (Potomac Books 2015). Included is a table of contents for the book and a summary of the line of argument of all of its chapters. (Chapter 3 of the book is also available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2413875).
Keywords
Criminal law, sentencing, law enforcement & corrections, just punishment, gold mining camps, bread thieves, Nazi concentration camps, wagon trains, vigilantes, social cooperation, social cohesion, collapse, shared understandings of justice, evolutionary benefit, perceptions of unfairness, moral reasoning
Publication Title
Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the law
Repository Citation
Robinson, Paul H. and Robinson, Sarah M., "Justice: 1850s San Francisco and the California Gold Rush" (2015). All Faculty Scholarship. 1149.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1149
Included in
Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Law and Society Commons, Peace and Conflict Studies Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, Public Policy Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Social Policy Commons
Publication Citation
Chapter 4, in PIRATES, PRISONERS, AND LEPERS: LESSONS FROM LIFE OUTSIDE THE LAW (Potomac Books 2015).