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Full-Text Articles in Law
Screening, Plea Bargains And The Innocent Problem, Oren Gazal
Screening, Plea Bargains And The Innocent Problem, Oren Gazal
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
Courts in common law countries reject plea-agreements only when the agreed upon sentence is seen as exceedingly lenient. This judicial intervention is designed to ensure that plea-bargaining does not undermine deterrence. Many legal scholars argue against this policy, claiming that courts should prohibit plea-bargaining all together. They argue that the plea-bargaining system increases the risk of wrongful convictions. Economists often criticize this judicial intervention as well, but for a different reason. Rather than advocating the abolition of plea-bargaining, many economists argue that the courts should accept all plea-agreements without review. They claim that plea-bargaining can help ensure an efficient use …
Corporate Defendants And The Protections Of Criminal Procedure: An Economic Analysis, Vikramaditya S. Khanna
Corporate Defendants And The Protections Of Criminal Procedure: An Economic Analysis, Vikramaditya S. Khanna
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
Corporations are frequently treated as “persons” under the law. One of the fundamental questions associated with this treatment is whether corporations should receive the same Constitutional protections and guarantees as natural persons. In particular, should corporations receive the Constitutional protections of Criminal Procedure? After all, corporations cannot be sent to jail so the sanctions they face are essentially the same as in civil proceedings. If so, then why not have the same procedural protections for corporate defendants in civil and criminal cases? Little scholarly analysis has focused on this issue from an economic perspective and this article aims to fill …
The Market For Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control And Jurisdictional Competition, Doron Teichman
The Market For Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control And Jurisdictional Competition, Doron Teichman
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
For the most part, the United States has a decentralized criminal justice system. State legislatures define the majority of crimes and set out the punishments for those crimes. In addition, the enforcement of criminal laws lies, in most cases, in the hands of local law enforcement agencies. This article points out how this decentralized structure drives local jurisdictions to harshen their criminal justice system in order to displace crime to neighboring jurisdictions. More precisely, local jurisdictions can attempt to displace crime in two distinct ways. First, they can raise the expected sanction to a level that is higher than that …
Sex, Shame, And The Law: An Economic Perspective On Megan's Law, Doron Teichman
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 …