Law Commons^™

Perfecting Criminal Markets, David Jaros

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From illicit drugs to human smuggling to prostitution, legislators may actually be perfecting the very criminal markets they seek to destroy. Criminal laws often create new dangers and new criminal opportunities. Criminalizing drugs creates the opportunity to sell fake drugs. Raising the penalties for illegal immigration increases the risk that smugglers will rely on dangerous methods that can injure or kill their human cargo. Banning prostitution increases the underground spread of sexually transmitted disease. Lawmakers traditionally respond to these “second order” problems in predictable fashion — with a new wave of criminalization that imposes additional penalties on fake drug dealers, …

Separate But Equal: Miranda's Rights To Silence And Counsel, Steven P. Grossman

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Three decades ago, the Supreme Court created a dubious distinction between the rights accorded to suspects in custody who invoke their right to silence and who invoke their right to counsel. This distinction significantly disadvantages those who do not have the good sense or good fortune to specify they want an attorney when they invoke their right to remain silent. This article argues that this distinction was flawed at its genesis and that it has led to judicial decisions that are inconsistent, make little sense, and permit police behavior that substantially diminishes the right to silence as described in Miranda …

Madness Alone Punishes The Madman: The Search For Moral Dignity In The Court's Competency Doctrine As Applied In Capital Cases, J. Amy Dillard

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The purposes of the competency doctrine are to guarantee reliability in criminal prosecutions, to ensure that only those defendants who can appreciate punishment are subject to it, and to maintain moral dignity, both actual and apparent, in criminal proceedings. No matter his crime, the “madman” should not be forced to stand trial. Historically, courts viewed questions of competency as a binary choice, finding the defendant either competent or incompetent to stand trial. However, in Edwards v. Indiana, the Supreme Court conceded that it views competency on a spectrum and offered a new category of competency — borderline-competent. The Court held …

Introduction: Benefits Of Private Enforcement: Empirical Background, Robert H. Lande

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This short piece takes a first step toward providing the empirical bases for an assessment of the benefits of private enforcement. It presents evidence showing that private enforcement of the antitrust laws is serving its intended purposes and is in the public interest. Private enforcement helps compensate victimized consumers, and it also helps deter anticompetitive conduct. This piece demonstrates this by briefly summarizing a more detailed analysis of forty of the largest recent successful private antitrust cases.

To analyze these cases' compensation effects this presents, inter alia, the amount of money each action recovered, what proportion of the money was …