A behavioral economics literature identifies how behaviorally-derived assumptions affect the economic analysis of criminal law and public law enforcement. We review and extend that literature. Specifically, we consider the effect of cognitive biases, prospect theory, hedonic adaptation,...

The relationships between criminal law and economics are surely of great importance, as the matters related to crime, punishment, reeducation of the prisoners and so on have a great impact on the society. In other words, the crime and its consequences have heavy social costs, both for private...

Prostitution in the United States in the early 19th century was an almost entirely individual, ad hoc, unorganized activity. In the 1910s, the Progressive Movement arrived, bringing with it enforcement of harsh criminal penalties of prostitution for the first time. Within a couple of decades, a...

Although the study of plea bargaining would seem, by its nature, to invite interdisciplinary collaboration between criminal law and dispute resolution scholars, there has been remarkably little cross-fertilization between the fields. In this Essay, we discuss the suitability of conceptualizing...

Leniency programs reduce sanctions for law violators that self-report. I focus on their ability to deter price-fixing cartels - and organized crime in general - by increasing incentives to "cheat" on partners. Moderate leniency programs that reduce/cancel sanctions for a spontaneously reporting...

China’s rapid rise to become the second largest economy in the world is nothing short of extraordinary. When economic reforms took off in the late 1970s, China had been without formal criminal law for three decades. China’s economic development since the launch of the reform period has...

In environmental criminal law, often vague notions are used to describe the behaviour that should be punished. This is also the case in a recent EC Directive on environmental crime. This EC Directive forces Member States to use the criminal law as an enforcement mechanism in case of violations...

In this paper, I consider how tort law and criminal law - conceived as interlocking and overlapping systems for protecting and upholding the legal rights people have against other people - should operate in a society where there are not enough public funds available to run those systems properly...

All states have criminal laws that can be used to punish sexual behaviors that pose some risk of HIV transmission; half have HIV-specific laws criminalizing sexual contact by people with HIV unless they abstain from unsafe sex, or disclose their HIV status and obtain consent from their partners....

The purpose of this note is to investigate the optimal enforcement of the penal code when criminals invest in a specific class of avoidance activities termed dissembling activities (i.e. self-protection efforts undertaken by criminals to hedge their illegal gains in case of detection and...