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Full-Text Articles in Law
Identifying Criminals’ Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick
Identifying Criminals’ Risk Preferences, Murat C. Mungan, Jonathan Klick
Indiana Law Journal
There is a 250-year-old presumption in the criminology and law enforcement literature that people are deterred more by increases in the certainty rather than increases in the severity of legal sanctions. We call this presumption the Certainty Aversion Presumption (CAP). Simple criminal decision-making models suggest that criminals must be risk seeking if they behave consistently with CAP. This implication leads to disturbing interpretations, such as criminals being categorically different from law-abiding people, who often display risk-averse behavior while making financial decisions. Moreover, policy discussions that incorrectly rely on criminals’ risk attitudes implied by CAP are ill informed, and may therefore …
Lawyering Wars: Failing Leadership, Risk Aversion, And Lawyer Creep—Should We Expect More Lone Survivors?, Arthur Rizer
Lawyering Wars: Failing Leadership, Risk Aversion, And Lawyer Creep—Should We Expect More Lone Survivors?, Arthur Rizer
Indiana Law Journal
“We are a nation of laws, not men.” This motto—made famous by the Supreme Court case Marbury v. Madison1—has existed since the founding of the United States. This maxim embodies the sentiment that, in order to prevent tyranny, citizens should be governed by fixed law rather than the whims of a dictator. In his decision, Chief Justice John Marshall did not qualify his remarks by saying, “we are a nation of laws, except in time of war.” Indeed with the modern U.S. military, Cicero’s observation that “[l]aws are inoperative in war” has never been further from the truth. Never before …