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Full-Text Articles in Law
Against Prediction: Sentencing, Policing, And Punishing In An Actuarial Age, Bernard E. Harcourt
Against Prediction: Sentencing, Policing, And Punishing In An Actuarial Age, Bernard E. Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
Actuarial methods – i.e., the use of statistical rather than clinical methods on large datasets of criminal offending rates to determine different levels of offending associated with one or more group traits, in order to (1) predict past, present or future criminal behavior and (2) administer a criminal justice outcome – now permeates the criminal law and its enforcement. With the single exception of racial profiling against African-Americans and Hispanics, most people view the turn to the actuarial as efficient, rational, and wealth-maximizing. The fact is, law enforcement agencies can detect more crime with the same resources if they investigate …
Legal Socialization Of Children And Adolescents, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom Tyler
Legal Socialization Of Children And Adolescents, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom Tyler
Faculty Scholarship
Research on children and the law has recently renewed its focus on the development of children's ties to law and legal actors. We identify the developmental process through which these relations develop as legal socialization, a process that unfolds during childhood and adolescence as part of a vector of developmental capital that promotes compliance with the law and cooperation with legal actors. In this paper, we show that ties to the law and perceptions of law and legal actors among children and adolescents change over time and age. We show that neighborhood contexts and experiences with legal actors shape the …
An Analysis Of The Nypd's Stop-And-Frisk Policy In The Context Of Claims Of Racial Bias, Andrew Gelman, Alex Kiss, Jeffrey Fagan
An Analysis Of The Nypd's Stop-And-Frisk Policy In The Context Of Claims Of Racial Bias, Andrew Gelman, Alex Kiss, Jeffrey Fagan
Faculty Scholarship
Recent studies by police departments and researchers confirm that police stop racial and ethnic minority citizens more often than whites, relative to their proportions in the population. However, it has been argued stop rates more accurately reflect rates of crimes committed by each ethnic group, or that stop rates reflect elevated rates in specific social areas such as neighborhoods or precincts. Most of the research on stop rates and police-citizen interactions has focused on traffic stops, and analyses of pedestrian stops are rare. In this paper, we analyze data from 175,000 pedestrian stops by the New York Police Department over …
Attention Felons: Evaluating Project Safe Neighborhoods In Chicago, Andrew V. Papachristos, Tracey L. Meares, Jeffrey Fagan
Attention Felons: Evaluating Project Safe Neighborhoods In Chicago, Andrew V. Papachristos, Tracey L. Meares, Jeffrey Fagan
Faculty Scholarship
This research uses a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact of Project Safe Neighborhood (PSN) initiatives on neighborhood level crime rates in Chicago. Four interventions are analyzed: (1) increased federal prosecutions for convicted felons carrying or using guns, (2) the length of sentences associated with federal prosecutions, (3) supply-side firearm policing activities, and (4) social marketing of deterrence and social norms messages through justice-style offender notification meetings. Using an individual growth curve models and propensity scores to adjust for non-random group assignment, our findings suggest that several PSN interventions are associated with greater declines of homicide in the treatment neighborhoods …
From Violent Crime To Terrorism: The Changing Basis Of The Federal, State And Local Law Enforcement Dynamic, Daniel C. Richman
From Violent Crime To Terrorism: The Changing Basis Of The Federal, State And Local Law Enforcement Dynamic, Daniel C. Richman
Faculty Scholarship
Two lines of questions dominate discussions about how the nation ought to respond at home to the new (or rather newly perceived) terrorist threat: How do we ensure that information about potential terrorist activities is effectively gathered, shared, and used? And how do we ensure that the Government neither abuses the investigative authority we give it, nor demands more authority than it needs? Each line can profitably be pursued in its own terms. Yet to keep the conversations separate is to miss seeing how the very process of creating an effective domestic intelligence network may introduce a salutary level of …
Law Enforcement Under Incomplete Law: Theory And Evidence From Financial Market Regulation, Chenggang Xu, Katharina Pistor
Law Enforcement Under Incomplete Law: Theory And Evidence From Financial Market Regulation, Chenggang Xu, Katharina Pistor
Faculty Scholarship
This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the social-welfare loss that results from the regime's inability to deter harmful actions. As a potential remedy a regulatory regime is introduced. The major functional difference between courts and regulators is that courts enforce law reactively, that is only once others have initiated law enforcement procedures, while regulators enforce law proactively, i.e. on their own initiative. Proactive law enforcement may be superior in preventing harm. However, …
Patterns Of Legal Change: Shareholder And Creditor Rights In Transition Economies, Katharina Pistor
Patterns Of Legal Change: Shareholder And Creditor Rights In Transition Economies, Katharina Pistor
Faculty Scholarship
This paper analyses changes in the legal protection of shareholder and creditor rights in 24 transition economies from 1990 to 1998. It documents differences in the initial conditions and a tendency towards convergence of formal legal rules as the result of extensive legal reforms. Convergence seems to be primarily the result of foreign technical assistance programs as well as of harmonisation requirements for countries wishing to join the European Union. The external supply of legal rules not withstanding, the pattern of legal reforms suggests that law reform has been primarily responsive, or lagging, rather than leading economic development. In comparison, …