ABSTRACT
William Stuntz is famous for turning long-held narratives about the criminal justice system on their heads. One of Stuntz's preferred stylistic approaches to describing a problem he sought to resolve was to identify the problem in a way both familiar and persuasive to readers, and then show why that familiar and persuasive narrative was, "of course, wrong". Of course, Stuntz cannot and would not claim as his own the concept that conventional wisdom should be challenged. John Kenneth Galbraith introduced the term to describe the tempting heuristic people use to reduce aspects of life that are "incoherent, inchoate, and intellectually frustrating" to something more agreeable to one's social or intellectual tastes. The next aspect of a Stuntzian approach-to defy easy ideological labels-flows from the first. Stuntz self-identified as a conservative Republican At least, so asserts Lincoln Caplan in an editorial eulogy in the New York Times.
