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...

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...

Standard theory assumes that voters' preferences over actions (voting) are induced by their preferences over electoral outcomes (policies, candidates). But voters may also have non-consequentialist (NC) motivations: they may care about how they vote even if it does not a¤ect the outcome. When...

This paper defends judicial review on the grounds that judicial review is necessary for protecting “a right to a hearing.” Judicial review is praised by its advocates on the basis of instrumentalist reasons, i.e., because of its desirable contingent consequences such as protecting rights,...