from the dean Paul G. Mahoney …
An Endlessly Inquisitive Mind This issue of the UVA Lawyer focuses on criminal law and procedure. We were inspired to do so as a tribute to former UVA Law professor William J. Stuntz ’84, who touched so many members of our community before his untimely death last spring. Many people close to Bill—classmates, friends, students, members of his church, and members of our faculty and the faculty at Harvard Law School, where he taught for the last several years of his life—have spoken and written movingly about his kindness, decency, and humility and the deep Christian faith from which they proceeded. Bill’s scholarly personality was every bit as attractive. He was endlessly inquisitive and willing to look at an issue from multiple angles before reaching a conclusion. He thought deeply but also broadly, drawing insights from criminology, economics, history, and other fields to understand the structure of criminal law and procedure. Moreover, he was a profoundly generous scholar who was willing to spend hours helping others think through a problem in their own research. Bill was not the type to claim to have a Theory of Everything, but there was one theme that ran through all his scholarship: the incoherence of Constitutional doctrines that regulate in minute detail the procedures by which police investigate crime, but put little or no limits on prosecutors’ charging decisions or legislators’ definitions of and sanctions for crimes. The result is a system that pays meticulous attention to the procedural rights of the accused while relentlessly expanding the scope of criminal liability to the point where the boundaries between innocent and criminal conduct are indistinct. The result, in Bill’s view, is suboptimal both from a procedural and a substantive perspective. The articles in this issue illustrate the explanatory power of Bill’s insights. He pointed out that the boundary between acceptable and criminal conduct was increasingly being drawn not by the formal lawmaking process, but by on-the-fly decisions of prosecutors and police.