The Gulf oil spill was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, and will be the most significant criminal case ever prosecuted under U.S. environmental laws. The Justice Department is likely to prosecute BP, Transocean, and Halliburton for criminal violations of the Clean Water Act and...

“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...

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...

During the 1990s, Latin America experienced a criminal procedural revolution (LACPR) when approximately 70% of its countries abandoned their inquisitorial system and adopted the U.S. adversarial model. Followed the LACPR, the region experienced a dramatic increase in crime, consolidating it as...

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...

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...

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....

Corporate compliance is becoming increasingly “criminalized.” What began as a means of industry self-regulation has morphed into a multi-billion dollar effort to avoid government intervention in business, specifically criminal and quasi-criminal investigations and prosecutions. In order to...

This article estimates the impact of weather on crime in the Czech Republic. Using detailed crime data during the years 2005-2015, I show that temperature has a significant positive effect on the total number of assaults, thefts, robberies and sexual crimes recorded. Furthermore, precipitation...