Research about justice for individual parties has been primarily concerned with the content of rules and principles and has insufficiently tried to penetrate discretionary justice as meted out by police, prosecutors, and other administrators. In this groundbreaking study Kenneth Culp Davis dispels the prevailing notion that discretionary justice is too elusive for scholarly investigation.
Davis advances proposals for badly needed reforms in our system of discretionary justice and lays the groundwork for further empirical and philosophical studies. "Our jurisprudence of statutes and of judge-made law," says Davis, "is overdeveloped; our jurisprudence of administrative justice, of police justice, of prosecutor justice- of discretionary justice is under-developed. We need a new jurisprudence that will encompass all of justice, not just the easy half of it.