Drawing upon data interviews with Chinese judges who were involved in the decision-making process, we develop two variables for analyzing the influence of social ties, or guanxi, in the judicial setting. The first differentiates the strength of guanxi – whether it is strong or weak. The second...

The fundamental question in any corporate bankruptcy case is whether the bankrupt firm should be liquidated or continued (and how). This paper provides a generic model as to how this question can be addressed by the bankruptcy judge who does not know at the outset whether the management of the...

Although much has been written about the ethical implications of choosing to use cost-benefit analysis as a regulatory decision procedure, the ethical choices made “inside” cost-benefit analysis tend to be obscured by the technicality of cost-benefit procedures. Indeed, Congress, courts, and...

In professional life, as elsewhere, many distinct processes must be successfully navigated for principled moral action to take place. Professionals need to be sensitive to situational factors that call for moral consideration; they need to be capable of reflecting on those features to arrive at...

In criminal cases the task of the judge is to transform the uncertainty about the facts into the certainty of the verdict. In this experiment we examine the relationship between evidence of which the strength is known, subjective probability of guilt and verdict for abstract cases. We look at...

The decisions Presidents and those operating under their authority take determine the course of our nation and the trajectory of our lives. Consequently, understanding who has the power and authority to decide has captured both the attention of legal scholars across a variety of fields for many...

In this paper, we show that sentencing norms vary widely even across geographically close units. By examining North Carolina's unique judicial rotation system, we show that judges arriving in a new court gradually converge to local sentencing norms. We document factors that facilitate this...