Law and Economics Commons^™

Sentencing The Criminal Corproation, Poonam Puri

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article contributes to the debate on mandatory minimum sentences by analzing them in the context of the corporation as criminal and by employing a law and economics methodology. While the rational economic actor model maybe unrealistic when applied to individuals committing blue-collar crimes, it is a much more useful tool to describe the behaviour of criminal corporations that respond more directly to economic incentives. The article concludes that the mandatory fine for a corporation found guilty of a criminal offence should, at a minimum, equal the expected loss caused or profit gained from the wrongdoing.

Insurer Moral Hazard In The Workers' Compensation Crisis: Reforming Cost Inflation, Not Rate Suppression, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

This article challenges the standard story of the insurance crisis that led to the near-collapse and major reform of a number of states’ workers’ compensation programs in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the prevailing account, insurance costs rose due to expanding costs of benefits for injured workers’, much of which was blamed on wasteful or abusive "moral hazard" by workers and their lawyers and doctors. Because state regulators had substantial power to control insurance rates, this account claims governments tried to suppress prices in the face of rising benefit costs in a misguided attempt to avoid political trade-offs between labor …

Can Evolutionary Science Contribute To Discussions Of Law?, Jeffrey E. Stake

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Evolutionary Theory can be helpful in understanding the law and determining what it should be. There are two ways in which the evolutionary perspective differs from an economic perspective on law. Not only does the evolutionary approach shift our attention from the world today to the environment of evolutionary adaptation, it shifts our focus from rational individuals to rational genes and from rational behaviors to rational design of mental architecture. Finally, the law of law's leverage makes predictions about the relative elasticities of demand for all sorts of behaviors, including those that did and did not exist in the environment …