Alan Griffiths has a good article on exception handling that mirrors much of my thinking. Checked exceptions have been overused in Java and that has given them a bad name. Griffiths' guidelines suggest that a class in a particular package can only throw exception types from the same package. This is the same as saying that exception handling should preserve the layering of the system. The guidelines call for translation of exceptions to preserve this layering, including the conversion of checked exceptions to unchecked exceptions for those cases where checked exceptions have been overused (such as SQLException). He references Bruce Eckels' Does Java need Checked Exceptions?, which contains a nice checked exception to unchecked exception adapter, and some interesting observations inspired by his adventures in Python.