NSF recently awarded funding to Robert Baller and Celesta Albonetti to gather scholars from around the country for a fall 2009 interdisciplinary symposium titled "Symposium on Judicial and Prosecutorial Discretion in Criminal Adjudication: Have Federal and State Reform Efforts Produced Greater Equality in Sentence Adjudication?" The symposium will bring together legal scholars and social scientists who study the influence of legal and extra-legal variables on sentence severity. Including scholars representing distinct approaches to the study of legal decision making in a unique gathering promises to be both intellectually stimulating and influential for public policy.

The symposium will address the transformative concepts of judicial and prosecutorial discretion, extra-legal variables, and social control. Participants will present original research on the extent to which federal-level and state-level reforms of sentencing practices have produced equality in sentence outcomes for felony defendants. Particular attention will be given to addressing the question of whether earlier findings of gender and race/ethnicity differences in sentencing have diminished under determinative/presumptive guidelines.

The symposium will include both academic presentations at the University of Iowa and a public panel presentation and discussion of the research findings at the Iowa City Public Library. Both events will be jointly sponsored by the University of Iowa’s Center for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and the National Science Foundation. University faculty and students, both graduate and undergraduate, will participate in a question and answer period during the on campus event, while citizens of the local community will be exposed to cutting-edge research on the effects of two decades of sentencing reform with the opportunity to comment and pose questions to the researchers.