This research applies ideas from Max Weber’s sociology of law to sentencing guidelines. Resulting publications argue that the rationale behind sentencing guidelines disregards the structural conditions under which they must function and thus results in counterproductive consequences.
- Joachim J. Savelsberg. 1992. "Law That Does Not Fit Society: Sentencing Guidelines as a Neo-Classical Reaction to the Dilemmas of Substantivized Law." American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 97, No. 5, pp. 1346-81. [REPRINTED in The Social Organization of Criminal Courts, edited by Jo Dixon et al. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. (International Library of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Penology) (2006)]
- Joachim J. Savelsberg. 2006. “Sociological Theory in the Study of Sentencing: Lighthouse for a Traveler between Continents.” Pp. 185-204 in Sociological Theory and Criminological Research: Views from Europe and the United States, edited by Mathieu Deflem. Elsevier Science.