Law Commons^™

Plea Bargaining Outside The Shadow Of Trial, Stephanos Bibas

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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 …

Does Criminal Law Deter? A Behavioral Science Investigation, Paul H. Robinson

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Having a criminal justice system that imposes sanctions no doubt does deter criminal conduct. But available social science research suggests that manipulating criminal law rules within that system to achieve heightened deterrence effects generally will be ineffective. Potential offenders often do not know of the legal rules. Even if they do, they frequently are unable to bring this knowledge to bear in guiding their conduct, due to a variety of situational, social, or chemical factors. Even if they can, a rational analysis commonly puts the perceived benefits of crime greater than its perceived costs, due to a variety of criminal …

Pleas' Progress, Stephanos Bibas

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No abstract provided.

Interview With Michael Levy, Christina Fahmy, Michael Levy, Legal Oral History Project, University Of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Legal Oral History Project

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Michael Levy (L '69) is the Chief of Computer Crimes at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He has served in the U.S. Department of Justice since 1980 with two one-year excursions into private practice. Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s office, Mr. Levy worked as a Public Defender and as an Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia and as an Assistant Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He also had his own law practice for four years.

Criminal Justice In The Information Age: A Punishment Theory Paradox, Paul H. Robinson

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This paper suggests how the information age might produce high capture and conviction rates and speculates on the effect of such developments on the criminal justice system's punishment theory. The low rate at which offenders presently are punished makes a deterrent threat of official sanction of limited effect. With a high punishment rate, however, a distribution of liability and punishment based upon a deterrence principle might, for the first time, make sense. On the other hand, the greater deterrent effect might eliminate crime as a serious social concern. And, without the pressure of a serious crime problem, the theory for …

Defending Imminence: From Battered Women To Iraq, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

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The war against Iraq and nonconfrontational killings by battered women are two recent examples of a more general theoretical problem. The underlying question is when may a defender act in self-defense. While some nineteenth century common law cases vested the rights in the defender, arguing that it was unfair to force her to live in fear, contemporary domestic and international law cast the balance decidedly on the side of the aggressor, by forcing the defender to wait until the aggressor's attack is imminent. The Bush Administration and the battered woman simply ask whether the pendulum swung too far in the …

The Psychology Of Hindsight And After-The-Fact Review Of Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel, Stephanos Bibas

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No abstract provided.

Integrating Remorse And Apology Into Criminal Procedure, Stephanos Bibas, Richard A. Bierschbach

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No abstract provided.

The Feeney Amendment And The Continuing Rise Of Prosecutorial Power To Plea Bargain, Stephanos Bibas

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No abstract provided.

Reason, Results, And Criminal Responsibility, Stephen J. Morse

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No abstract provided.

The Social And Moral Cost Of Mass Incarceration In African American Communities, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Torture, Necessity, And The Union Of Law & Philosophy, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

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This brief essay critiques the torture memoranda's use of the necessity defense from the perspectives of criminal law doctrine, criminal law theory, and moral philosophy.

"The Shame Of It All": Stigma And The Political Disenfranchisement Of Formerly Convicted And Incarcerated Persons, Regina Austin

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No abstract provided.

The Virtues Of Uncertainty In Law: An Experimental Approach, Tom Baker, Alon Harel, Tamar Kugler

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Predictability in civil and criminal sanctions is generally understood as desirable. Conversely, unpredictability is condemned as a violation of the rule of law. This paper explores predictability in sanctioning from the point of view of efficiency. It is argued that, given a constant expected sanction, deterrence is increased when either the size of the sanction or the probability that it will be imposed is uncertain. This conclusion follows from earlier findings in behavioral decision research and the results of an experiment conducted specifically to examine this hypothesis. The findings suggest that, within an efficiency framework, there are virtues to uncertainty …