The traditional premise of criminal law is that criminals who are convicted of similar crimes under similar circumstances ought to be subject to identical sentences. This article provides an efficiency-based rationale for discriminatory sentencing, i.e., establishes circumstances under which...

How can deontologists reconcile the stringency of the moral prohibition on torture with the recognition that it may sometimes be the only means to prevent catastrophe? This article proposes a conception of deontology that allows for the resolution of this dilemma. Casting deontology in terms of...

Judicial review (JR) is typically justified on consequentialist grounds, namely that it is conducive to the efficacious protection of individual rights. This Essay disputes this popular explanation for JR and argues that JR is based on a right to voice a grievance or a right to a hearing - a...

Since Becker (<CitationRef CitationID="CR3">1971</CitationRef>), a common argument against asymmetric norms that promote minority rights over those of the majority is that such policies reduce total welfare. While this may be the case, we show that there are simple environments where aggregate sum of individual utilities is actually...</citationref>

The influence of social norms on the willingness to obey legal norms depends on contingencies that have not been investigated. Theoretical, behavioral, and experimental considerations investigated in this paper establish the differential behavioral effects of legal rules and standards. The...

This paper establishes that there may be an inverse relation between the rate of detection and the deterrent effects of stigma. The more people are detected and stigmatized, the less deterrence there may be. This conclusion is based on a search model in which the costs of searching for...

Criminal sanctions are usually public, stable and predictable. In contrast, the practices governing the determination of the probability of detection and conviction reinforce uncertainty. We invoke psychological insights to illustrate that criminals prefer a scheme in which the size of the...