Law Commons^™

Policing Identity, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

Identity has long played a critical role in policing. Learning “who” an individual is not only affords police knowledge of possible criminal history, but also of “what” an individual might have done. To date, however, these matters have eluded sustained scholarly attention, a deficit that has assumed ever greater significance as government databases have become more comprehensive and powerful. Identity evidence, in short, has and continues to suffer from an identity crisis, which this Article seeks to remedy. The Article does so by first surveying the methods historically used by police to identify individuals, from nineteenth-century efforts to measure bodies …

Brady, Trust, And Error, Samuel R. Wiseman

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Waiving Innocence, Samuel R. Wiseman

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Don't Say You're Sorry Unless You Mean It: Pricing Apologies To Achieve Credibility, Murat C. Mungan

Scholarly Publications

Remorse and apologies by offenders have not been rigorously analyzed in the law and economics literature. This is perhaps because apologies are regarded as ’cheap talk’ and are deemed to be non-informative of an individual’s conscious state. In this paper, I develop a formal framework in which one can analyze remorse and apologies. I argue that legal procedures can be designed to price apologies, such that only truly remorseful individuals apologize. Hence, apologies would not be mere ’cheap talk’ and could send correct signals regarding an offender’s true conscious state, making them credible. This will lead victims, upon receiving apologies, …

The Law And Economics Of Fluctuating Criminal Tendencies And Incapacitation, Murat C. Mungan

Scholarly Publications

Economic analyses of criminal law are frequently and heavily criticized for being unable to explain many criminal law rules and doctrines people find intuitively just. Existing economic models cannot properly explain, for instance, why criminal law distinguishes between (1) repeat offenders and first-time offenders, (2) murder and voluntary manslaughter, and (3) remorseful and non-remorseful offenders.

This Article proposes a richer economic theory of crime that captures the rationales behind these practices and potentially behind many other important criminal law principles and doctrines. Unlike an overwhelming majority of previous economic analyses, my theory accounts not only for the deterrent effect of …