Austin Lovegrove examines the thinking of judges as they sentence multiple offenders, and identifies the strategies judges have developed to help them apply sentencing law in individual cases, based on their responses when asked to "think aloud" while undertaking sentencing problems. Giving increased specificity to legal analyses of the sentencing process, Dr. Lovegrove enables the appropriateness of the judicial approach to be evaluated, and offers a basis for rule-based and numerical guidelines by making what is currently a largely intuitive process more deliberative.

This book describes an original, empirical study of judicial decision making. The process of determining sentences is a difficult one for judges and often unnecessarily intuitive, subjective, and complex. The present study introduces a conceptual outline and empirical technique for increasing the precision of sentencing policy, thus offering an aid to judges who sentence in the light of this policy. The primary purpose of this model of judicial decision making is to provide a framework for scaling the seriousness of any single case in relation to the facts of that case and for relating this...