This article discusses the growing identity theft problem in cyberspace, focusing specifically on phishing attacks. Victims of identity theft and phishing attacks suffer direct financial losses, though the real price these crimes exact is in the time and money spent trying to rebuild a victim's...

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....

A common view in the law and economics literature holds that equal increases in type-1 and type-2 error lower deterrence by the same amount. We demonstrate that this view is generally incorrect both when the court's error concerns the assessment of the alleged offender's act (mistake of act) and...

This essay reviews the economics of criminal procedure, proceeding through four topics in the literature. First, I review the implications of substantive criminal law theories for criminal procedure. The second part discusses the error cost model of criminal procedure, which is the dominant...

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...

We conducted an experiment with 182 inmates from a maximum-security prison to analyze the impact of criminal identity on dishonest behavior. We randomly primed half of the prisoners to increase the mental saliency of their criminal identity, while treating the others as the control group. The...

This paper starts with a review the economics of criminal behavior. Then, the authors discuss the theory of public enforcement. The economic analysis of criminal behavior and criminal law has been a hugely successful enterprise. As an academic enterprise, it has achieved the goal of research –...

In this chapter, I briefly discuss theoretical predictions of capital punishment’s impact on crime, provide a concise history of the death penalty in the US, and review both the early and recent empirical literature

Some see criminal law as essentially or predominately an exercise in retributive justice. And some see private law as essentially or predominantly an exercise in corrective justice. There is considerable discussion of the relation between retributive and distributive justice in criminal law...