The Uses of Discretion

Download or read book The Uses of Discretion written by Keith Hawkins and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1994 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discretion is a pervasive phenomenon in legal systems. It is of concern to lawyers because it can be a force for justice or injustice: at once a means of advancing the broad purposes of law and of subventing them. For social scientists the discretion exercised by legal actors is animportant form of decision-making behaviour, in which legal rules are merely one force in a field of pressures and constraints that push towards certain courses of action or inaction. This book presents a variety of analyses of legal discretion by lawyers and social scientists (drawn from bothsides of the Atlantic), who have made discretion and its uses a central part of their scholarly concerns.