Marvin E. Frankel

Marvin Earle Frankel, who lived from 1920 to 2002, was an American lawyer who served as a United States district judge for the Southern District of New York from 1965 to 1978. He became one of the most influential figures in American sentencing reform through his 1973 book Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order, which argued that unrestrained judicial discretion in sentencing produced arbitrary and unequal outcomes. His arguments helped shape the sentencing reform movement that led to the federal Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, and his ideas continue to influence sentencing policy debates in the United States and other countries.