Sports bribery and match-fixing have become a part of the on-going sports news cycle. European and Asian match-fixing scandals in soccer, cricket and tennis have rocked the sports world recently. The 1919 Black Sox World Series scandal and the 1970's Boston College point shaving incidents have...

Preventive law enforcement increases social welfare by hindering the infliction of criminal harm, but produces inconvenience costs to the general public, because it requires interfering with the acts of innocents as well as attempters. This article shows that the optimal amount of investment in...

A great concern with plea-bargains is that they may induce innocent individuals to plead guilty to crimes they have not committed. In this article, we identify schemes that reduce the number of innocent-pleas without affecting guilty individuals' plea-bargain incentives. Large compensations for...

Actors, whether guilty or innocent, may invest in costly measures to reduce their likelihood of being audited. The value of these investments are increasing in the probability with which they expect to be found guilty conditional on being audited. Because strengthening the standard of proof...

Overcriminalization takes many forms and impacts the American criminal justice system in varying ways. This article focuses on a select portion of this phenomenon by examining two types of overcriminalization prevalent in white collar criminal law. The first type of over criminalization...

This paper presents a model of penalties that reconciles the conflicting accounts optimal punishment by Becker, who argued penalties should internalize social costs, and Posner, who suggested penalties should completely deter offenses. The model delivers specific recommendations as to when...

A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology, the private automobile. Decades of investment in this shift have created a car-centric landscape with...

This paper contains the chapters on public enforcement of law and on criminal law from a general, forthcoming book, Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law (Harvard University Press, 2003). By public law enforcement is meant the use of public law enforcement agents - such as police, tax...