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Full-Text Articles in Law
Forgiveness In Criminal Procedure, Stephanos Bibas
Forgiveness In Criminal Procedure, Stephanos Bibas
All Faculty Scholarship
Though forgiveness and mercy matter greatly in social life, they play fairly small roles in criminal procedure. Criminal procedure is dominated by the state, whose interests in deterring, incapacitating, and inflicting retribution leave little room for mercy. An alternative system, however, would focus more on the needs of human participants. Victim-offender mediation, sentencing discounts, and other mechanisms could encourage offenders to express remorse, victims to forgive, and communities to reintegrate and employ offenders. All of these actors could then better heal, reconcile, and get on with their lives. Forgiveness and mercy are not panaceas: not all offenders and victims would …
Calling A Truce In The Culture Wars: From Enron To The Cia, Craig S. Lerner
Calling A Truce In The Culture Wars: From Enron To The Cia, Craig S. Lerner
George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series
This Article compares and evaluates recent Congressional efforts to improve institutional “cultures” in the private and public sectors. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was designed to upgrade corporate culture by patching up the “walls” that separate corporate management from boards of directors, accountants, lawyers, and financial analysts. The Intelligence Reform Act of 2005 took a different tack, hammering away at walls that supposedly segmented the intelligence community. The logic was that the market failed because people did not observe sufficient formalities in their dealings with one another, while the intelligence community failed precisely because people kept their distance from one …
Victims And Perpetrators: An Argument For Comparative Liability In Criminal Law, Vera Bergelson
Victims And Perpetrators: An Argument For Comparative Liability In Criminal Law, Vera Bergelson
Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers
This article challenges the legal rule according to which the victim’s conduct is irrelevant to the determination of the perpetrator’s criminal liability. The author attacks this rule from both positive and normative perspectives, and argues that criminal law should incorporate an affirmative defense of comparative liability. This defense would fully or partially exculpate the defendant if the victim by his own acts has lost or reduced his right not to be harmed.
Part I tests the descriptive accuracy of the proposition that the perpetrator’s liability does not depend on the conduct of the victim. Criminological and victimological studies strongly suggest …
Whistle Blowing, Ben Depoorter, Jef De Mot
Whistle Blowing, Ben Depoorter, Jef De Mot
George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series
For law enforcement purposes corruption and fraud are hard battles. Because of the highly secretive and premeditated nature of these crimes, prime witnesses are themselves often implicated in the fraudulent transaction. Promises of immunity and whistle blowing rewards are often required to resolve these information asymmetries. These insights have set a trend, both in scholarship and law enforcement practice, towards reward-based approaches (carrots), as an alternative or complement to punishment based deterrence (sticks). Applying the U.S. False Claims Act (FCA) as an analytical framework, we provide a critical review of the efficiency limitations of whistle blowing. More specifically, the formal …
Plea Bargaining Outside The Shadow Of Trial, Stephanos Bibas
Plea Bargaining Outside The Shadow Of Trial, Stephanos Bibas
All Faculty Scholarship
Plea-bargaining literature predicts that parties strike plea bargains in the shadow of expected trial outcomes. In other words, parties forecast the expected sentence after trial, discount it by the probability of acquittal, and offer some proportional discount. This oversimplified model ignores how structural distortions skew bargaining outcomes. Agency costs; attorney competence, compensation, and workloads; resources; sentencing and bail rules; and information deficits all skew bargaining. In addition, psychological biases and heuristics warp judgments: overconfidence, denial, discounting, risk preferences, loss aversion, framing, and anchoring all affect bargaining decisions. Skilled lawyers can partly counteract some of these problems but sometimes overcompensate. The …
Pleas' Progress, Stephanos Bibas
Prison Reform Revisited: The Unfinished Agenda, Michael B. Mushlin
Prison Reform Revisited: The Unfinished Agenda, Michael B. Mushlin
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
Prison Reform Revisited: The Unfinished Agenda, which was held at Pace Law School from October 16-18, 2003, was a remarkable event. At this conference--a summit really--leading academics, attorneys, prison reformers, judges, prison officials and international prison reformers gathered at Pace Law School and the New York State Judicial Center in White Plains, New York to discuss how to advance the cause of prison reform in the U.S. This issue of the Pace Law Review is devoted to the papers presented in connection with that important conference.
Integrating Remorse And Apology Into Criminal Procedure, Stephanos Bibas, Richard A. Bierschbach
Integrating Remorse And Apology Into Criminal Procedure, Stephanos Bibas, Richard A. Bierschbach
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Dying Twice: Incarceration On Death Row, Michael B. Mushlin
Dying Twice: Incarceration On Death Row, Michael B. Mushlin
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
Dying Twice is an important report. The work is a collaboration between the Corrections Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, which I chaired, and the Committee on Capital Punishment of the Association chaired by Norman Greene. The working group that researched and wrote the report was drawn from members of both committees. The attorneys and the physician who served on the committee are wonderful, talented, dedicated people. It was a pleasure to work with professionals of this caliber on such an important effort. Dying Twice was endorsed as the position of the Association …
Double Helix, Double Bind: Factual Innocence And Postconviction Dna Testing, Seth F. Kreimer, David Rudovsky
Double Helix, Double Bind: Factual Innocence And Postconviction Dna Testing, Seth F. Kreimer, David Rudovsky
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Dying Twice: Conditions On New York's Death Row, Michael B. Mushlin
Dying Twice: Conditions On New York's Death Row, Michael B. Mushlin
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
In 1995 New York State revived the death penalty as a punishment for certain categories of murder, and established a “death row” for condemned men at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York (variously, “Clinton” or the “Prison”). Four years later, in October 1999, two committees of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (the “Association”) joined together to study the conditions of confinement on this death row--or, as it is officially called, the Unit for Condemned Persons (the “UCP”). These committees--the Committee on Corrections and the Committee on Capital Punishment--formed a joint subcommittee (the …
Judicial Fact-Finding And Sentence Enhancements In A World Of Guilty Pleas, Stephanos Bibas
Judicial Fact-Finding And Sentence Enhancements In A World Of Guilty Pleas, Stephanos Bibas
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.