A Response to Professor Kleinfeld's 'Reconstructivism: The Place of Criminal Law in Ethical Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This short paper is a response to Josh Kleinfeld's recent defense of a reconstructivist theory of criminal law. I argue that reconstructivism cannot explain why expressive nullification of crime is the central role for criminal justice institutions, nor why it is so important that this role take specific form of criminal punishment. Second, I argue that Kleinfeld vacillates between two different claims – that criminal law is constitutive of a society's way of life and quite different claim that criminal law is a means of protecting it. Third, I raise some concerns about relation of reconstructivism to historical and contemporary literature. Finally, I suggest that reconstructivism serves to effectively insulate a society's potentially oppressive use of criminal law from criticism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.028 | 0.043 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".