Western legal systems are far from having provided the same solution to the problem of whether acquitted pre-trial detainees should be compensated for the harm suffered as a result of detention on remand. Various arguments have been formulated in order to justify or criticize this compensation,...

To enforce the law, the government must learn about violations of the law. One way of obtaining such information is by employing police officers and investigators. An alternative way is by rewarding whistleblowers. In this paper I consider two basic questions relating to whistleblower rewards....

This article considers the possibility of simultaneously reducing crime, prison sentences, and the tax burden of financing the criminal justice system by introducing positive sanctions, which are benefits conferred to non-convicts. Specifically, it proposes a procedure wherein a part of the...

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...

The literature contains ambiguous findings as to whether statistical discrimination, e.g. in the form of racial profiling, causes a reduction in deterrence. These analyses, however, assume that enforcers' incentives are exogenously fixed. This article demonstrates that when the costs and...

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...

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...