The response to the trafficking of women is primarily dominated by the discourse of criminal law both internationally and nationally. By contrast, in the refugee law context, women are constructed as victims in a ‘culturally relative', patriarchal society. This paper explores the tensions...

I use three separate datasets and designs to determine whether sex offender registries are effective. First, state-level panel data is used to determine whether sex offender registries or public access to them decreases the rate of rape and other sexual abuse. Second, a dataset which contains...

Juries are a fundamental element of the criminal justice system. In this article, we model jury decision making as a function of two institutional variables: jury size and voting requirement. We expose the critical interdependence of these two elements in minimizing the probabilities of wrongful...

Sex offenders have become the targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the U.S. Two key innovations in recent decades have been registration and notification laws which, respectively, require that convicted sex offenders provide valid contact information to law...

We argue that changes in the terror alert level set by the Department of Homeland Security provide a shock to police presence in the Mall area of Washington, D.C. Using daily crime data during the period the terror alert system has been in place, we show that crime drops significantly, both...

We argue that changes in the terror alert level set by the Department of Homeland Security provide a shock to police presence in the Mall area of Washington, D.C. Using daily crime data during the period the terror alert system has been in place, we show that crime drops significantly, both...

This paper develops an economic analysis of enforcement technology choice and privacy rights. We provide an efficiency explanation for the Human Rights Act 1998 adopted by the UK. Our model suggests that an enforcement technology with privacy rights generates more offences (deterrence is...

n the United States, elected district attorneys' offices prosecute over 85% of all felony cases, but we know little about their effect on local criminal justice outcomes. Using a newly-collected dataset of district attorney elections, I show that the a Republican district attorney leads to a...

Using the universe of individual asylum cases in the United States from 2000-2004 and a difference-in-differences research design, we test whether Sept. 11, 2001 decreased the likelihood that applicants from Muslim-majority countries were granted asylum. Our estimates suggest that the attacks...