This chapter presents a public choice theory of criminal procedure. The core idea is that criminal procedure is best understood as a set of rules designed to thwart attempts to use the state's law enforcement power in a predatory fashion or in order to transfer wealth generally. For the most...

In recent years the term “wage theft” has been widely used to describe the phenomenon of employers not paying their workers the wages they are owed. While the term has great normative weight, it is rarely accompanied by calls for employers literally to be prosecuted under the criminal law....

On November 14, 2013, Professor Dervan was called to testify before the United States House of Representatives' Committee on the Judiciary Over-Criminalization Task Force. Available here is his written testimony. In his written testimony, Professor Dervan examines the phenomenon of...

Economists and Criminologists have very different models of human behavior. A total of 74 out of all 130 academics who published peer-reviewed empirical research on gun issues in criminology and economics journals responded to our survey. That was a 57% response rate. Looking at their views on...

This article shows that private enforcement of the U. S. antitrust laws-which usually is derided as essentially worthless-serves as a more important deterrent of anticompetitive behavior than the most esteemed antitrust program in the world, criminal enforcement by the Antitrust Division of the...

The author in this piece reflects on the death penalty in the U.S. in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The writer goes on to argue that capital punishment is, in and of itself, a form of violence. Also discussed in the article are the gradual removal of executions from public view,...

“Not guilty” — these two simple words elicit intense relief from any defendant at the conclusion of a criminal trial. As one harrowing ordeal ends, however, a new one inevitably takes shape: picking up the pieces of a life shattered physically, emotionally, and, for non-indigent...

Criminal behaviour always takes place within a context. The project MAVUS, which stands for Method for Assessment of Vulnerability of Sectors, deploys a method to measure the vulnerability of economic sectors to organised crime. MAVUS observes contexts, scanning for vulnerabilities...

A fundamental tenet of our criminal legal system is “proportionality”, the principle that more severe crimes are punished to a greater degree than less severe crimes. Despite this commitment to proportionality, determining how criminal penalties relate to one another is often difficult or...