Herbert L. Packer

Herbert Leslie Packer (1925 to 6 December 1972) was an American law professor and criminologist at Stanford University. He is best remembered for The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (1968), which set out two competing models of the criminal justice system, the crime control model and the due process model. The two models became a standard framework in criminology and criminal policy debates and still appear in undergraduate textbooks. Packer was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, studied at Yale University and Yale Law School, joined the Stanford law faculty in 1956 and served as Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Programs from 1967 to 1969. The book earned the Coif Book Award in 1970, and he died in 1972 at the age of 46.