Murphy's "Getting Even" and Criminal Law

This semester (and last year), I gave my first-year Criminal Law students the option of writing (in addition to the final examination) a "critical review" of Jeffrie Murphy's "Getting Even:  Forgiveness and Its Limits."  (For those students who exercised this option, the critical review was "worth" about 1/3 of their final grade).  I highly recommend the book.  I've now read it three times, and continue to find it both enlightening and unsettling.  (I'm also a big fan of Murphy's essay, "Law Like Love."  This piece asks, "what would law -- particularly criminal law [and punishment theory] -- be like if we regarded love (agape) as the first virtue of social and legal institutions?")  Here is a blurb from the SSRN abstract for "Getting Even":

This book - drawing from the resources of philosophy, law, psychology, religion, and literature - argues that vindictive emotions (anger, resentment, and the desire for revenge) deserve a more legitimate place in our moral, emotional, legal and even religious lives than we currently recognize and that forgiveness, though often a great virtue, deserves to be more cautiously and selectively granted.

And, here is a review, published a few years ago in First Things.

I cannot say with any confidence -- at least, not yet -- how my "critical review" option is perceived by my students, but I'd welcome reactions from Prawfsblawggers and readers.  The idea, I guess, has been to provide students with a way -- if they want to -- to explore "punishment theory" questions in more depth than an essay question on a three-hour exam permits, and also to give those students who are (or who think they are, or who fear they might be) not-so-good at showing what they've learned on exams another, separate chance to do so.  The option has resulted in considerably more pre-Christmas exam reading than I would otherwise have, but I think I'm happy with it.