“Navigating the Uncharted Expanse”

Marvin Frankel’s landmark book, Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order, sparked a revolution in sentencing across the US and thereafter around the world. Frankel proposed three principal solutions to what he described as essentially a ‘lawless’ process: (i) a permanent independent commission on sentencing; (ii) an articulation of policies or guidelines for judges to follow, and (iii) meaningful appellate review. The issues of sentencing guidance, sentencing guidelines, and sentencing commissions or councils[i] have been extensively debated in the literature since the publication of Frankel’s book. This article provides a brief chronology of developments relating to sentencing commissions around the world. Frankel’s concluding chapter ‘Proposals for the Lawmakers’ lays out his proposals for a more structured sentencing regime. In this essay we discuss the extent to which his recommendations been implemented outside the US.