Peter Chau
The Modern Law Review
Published online: October 2026
Abstract: This paper offers an original non-consequentialist justification for the ‘bulk discount’ given to offenders who are sentenced for multiple counts in a single proceeding, a discount that is available in most jurisdictions. Existing justifications for this practice face serious objections. I propose a new account, ‘Lexical Local Justification’. On this account, imposing a long total sentence for a large number of minor offences is problematic because, in such a case, each individual sentence would materially contribute to depriving the offender of a high-order good (such as the ability to pursue a meaningful life project) that a minor offence does not warrant taking away. One advantage of my account is that it preserves local punitive desert (the principle that the punishment for a particular crime should match that crime); it relies neither on non-local punitive desert (the principle that the total punishment for a group of offences should match that group as a whole) nor on the claim that there is always an increasing returns relationship between the actual severity of a sentence and its length.
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