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...

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...

The purpose of this Report is to present the operations of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Bulgaria for the first six months of 2020, based on indicators characterising the performance of its main statutory functions. One of the essential factors in the first six months of 2020 was...

This article argues that a failure to embrace a particular form of governance, "populist deliberative democracy" (PDD), likely contributes to the rise and persistence of mass incarceration in the United States. The article relies on varied converging sources of data. First, the article examines...

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

This paper assesses the law in the books versus law in action capacities of a state to prevent and combat terrorism financing. The methodology used combines actual cases with legal analysis of compliance with international legal rules and standards ratified by a state. A case study is focused on...

We propose and test a new survey methodology to assess the public's criminal justice spending priorities. Respondents are explicitly forced to trade-off one type of crime prevention or control policy for another and to consider the fact that any money spent on crime prevention or control...

The criminal legal system is at a crossroads. Calls for abolition are met with calls for modest adjustments or maintenance of the status quo. What frequently emerges from these polarities is a promise that police, prosecutors, judges, and other government actors will use their vast discretion to...

Broken Windows: the metaphor has changed New York and Los Angeles. Yet it is far from undisputed whether the broken windows policy was causal for reducing crime. In a series of lab experiments we show that first impressions are indeed causal for cooperativeness in three different institutional...