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Economics

2004

Criminal Law and Procedure

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

Sex, Shame, And The Law: An Economic Perspective On Megan's Law, Doron Teichman Sep 2004

Sex, Shame, And The Law: An Economic Perspective On Megan's Law, Doron Teichman

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This Article focuses on the question, how should policymakers aiming to minimize the cost of sanctioning utilize legal and nonlegal sanctions when designing a system of criminal sanctions. After presenting the general economic case for the use of nonlegal sanctions the article turns to present a model of shaming, which unlike existing models, incorporates the endogenous effects of legal and nonlegal sanctions. This model demonstrates that tailoring an efficient regime that combines legal and nonlegal sanctions might be more difficult than previously perceived by law and economics scholars. A specific case study presented in this article is of the current …


Toward A New Theory Of Notice And Deterrence, Dru Stevenson Mar 2004

Toward A New Theory Of Notice And Deterrence, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

This article sets forth a new model of “notice” and deterrence that helps explain some long-standing contradictions in the literature on deterrence. Nearly all the work in the area of criminal law and deterrence has included an assumption that would-be offenders know the laws and the threatened sanctions, and therefore adjust their behavior in light of these disincentives. The fact that most people seem to be ignorant of the exact boundaries of the rules, and ignorant of the sanctions, presents an enormous conceptual problem for the classic model of deterrence. This new model presents an alternative mechanism for deterrence based …


Entrapment And The Problem Of Deterring Police Misconduct, Dru Stevenson Feb 2004

Entrapment And The Problem Of Deterring Police Misconduct, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

Many the states currently use a version of the entrapment defense known as the “objective test,” which focuses solely on the extent of police overreaching in the case, and seeks to deter police misconduct by acquitting the defendant. Acquitting defendants as a means of deterring undercover police misconduct, however, is a public policy fraught with problems, and these problems have not been adequately addressed in the literature to date. This article applies the insights of modern deterrence theory to wrongful activity by police in undercover operations. In doing so, three general problems emerge. First, the objective test relies on an …