William J. Stuntz, a law professor best known for his work on the U.S. criminal justice system, died on Monday after a long struggle with cancer. I’ve admired Stuntz for a long time, and I was fortunate enough to have corresponded with him a bit over the years, though I certainly can’t say I knew him well. He wrote an essay for Christianity Today in 2009 that will give you a sense of his humility and intelligence.

I first encountered Stuntz’s writing at TechCentralStation, where he wrote a number of wonderful essays, including the Hookie Award-winning “Faculty Clubs and Church Pews.” I’m sorry to say that I can’t find a link to the piece, and I do hope that Stuntz’s TCS archive lives on somewhere. During the Bush years, a large and diverse crew of conservatives and libertarians were puzzling through the future of the American right. A decent number coalesced around the idea that believers in the power of markets and civil society needed to come up with new ideas about how to reform the public sector, to make it an engine of upward mobility rather than a jobs program for the well-connected and well-heeled. Stuntz was, in my opinion, one of the most creative, rigorous, and persuasive of the bunch.

After reading articles by John Donohue and Alex Tabarrok on the efficacy of increasing the number of police offers, I became a firm believer in the idea of embracing a deterrence rather than a punitive strategy for fighting crime, i.e., relying more on dense concentrations of cops to keep crime from happening in the first place rather than locking up offenders after the fact for long stretches. Donohue and Tabarrok made a case for the economic virtues of this approach, but Stuntz made the strongest moral and political case in the Weekly Standard in February of 2009, and I’ll always be grateful for that. I really want all of you to read Stuntz’s essay on “Law and Disorder” if you can. I can think of no better tribute to a great writer and thinker than for those of us with the power to make a difference to give his arguments their due. Stuntz was one of relatively few people to understand that the the persistence of high levels of violent crime is a genuine crisis that makes us poorer and more fearful than we deserve.