ABSTRACT
In general terms, the aim of this chapter is to describe and evaluate different sociological approaches to modelling judicial sentencing behaviour with a view to assessing the balance between universal factors in decision-making and particular contextual influences on sentencing practice. This implies that it is indeed possible to detect all the variables which might impact on the sentence decision-making process and that, in examining any given jurisdiction, it is also possible to pinpoint discrete variables peculiar to that specific context which influence sentencing. This is, of course, an objective that is extremely difficult to achieve
