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Our second speaker is Dan Markel speaking about retributive justice and the demands of

democratic citizenship.

Much of Dan Markel's work focused on a legal concept called Retributive Justice. The idea that the size of the punishment should be

proportionate to the size of the crime. Greetings everybody. Thank you very

much to Nick and to Eugene and to Todd and all my co-panelists as well as to

this speech to a bunch of legal academics at a hotel ballroom in DC was one of

dozens Dan gave on the subject over the years.

I argue that we can, as retributivist, loosen up on the criminalization question and

move beyond the insistence on moral wrongdoing as a prerequisite for justifying

retributive punishment at least in liberal democracies and that qualification

one of his most famous papers is an article called Against Mercy, right?

Which sounds hard, like how can you be against Mercy?

That's Dan's colleague, Mark Spotswood.

But the idea is exercising mercy in a case by case way

and lessening punishment really is just creating disparities

between offenders who've done similar things. So I'll stop there because I've

already gone on but I'm happy to answer questions later and hopefully this will

focus on conversation. Thanks. Dan wasn't just a colleague to Spotswood. He was a

friend. They first met when Spotswood moved from Northwestern to

...