What is Punishment?
A Conversation with Professor Gideon Yaffe
In this episode, I spoke with Gideon Yaffe, the Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. Professor Yaffe holds an A.B. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University. Professor Yaffe researches topics including the philosophy of law, causation, and free will. He has written extensively on criminal law, including on the theory of punishment. I spoke with Professor Yaffe about his paper “The Norm Shift Theory of Punishment.” In this paper, Professor Yaffe attempts to reorient thinking on punishment away from its focus on justification, and towards the question of how to define punishment in the first place. We discussed his theory of punishment, how his approach differs from theories of justification for punishment, and what significance his theory has for the legal system.