Proponents of work-based welfare reform claim that moving the poor from welfare to work will advance the goals of economic self-reliance and independence. Reform opponents attack these objectives as ideologically motivated and conceptually incoherent. Drawing on perspectives developed by luck...

THE criminal law codification movement of the 1960s and 70s was guided by instrumentalist principles designed to reduce crime, rather than by retributivist notions of giving offenders deserved punishment. The Model Penal Code, which served as a model for nearly all of the period's code reforms,...

This paper analyzes the regulatory implications of irrational exuberance and anxiety in securities markets. U.S. federal securities laws mandate the disclosure of certain information, but regulate only the cognitive form and content of that information. An important and unstudied question is how...

Professors Polinsky and Che advocate "decoupling" what plaintiffs recover from what defendants pay in damages, specifically arguing that lowering recovery and raising damages (by appropriate amounts) delivers the same level of primary activity deterrence with fewer filed suits. Professors Kahan...

Current writing on evidence tampering - inclusive of the destruction, fabrication, and suppression of evidence - creates the impression that our system of litigation is in a state of fundamental disrepair. This article suggests that this perception may merely reflect defects in the conventional...

Other contributors to this Symposium suggest a variety of changes to the Model Penal Code that they think justify producing a Model Penal Code Second. We offer such suggestions elsewhere. We want to use this space to discuss a slightly different, but related, subject: the need for, and potential...

Robinson supports the proposed "purposes" text of the New American Law Institute Report on Sentencing Reform but argues that in practice it will not mean what traditional utilitarians, like those supporting "limiting retributivism," are expecting. First, the proposed text allows reliance upon...

"Individual risk" currently plays a major role in risk assessment and in the regulatory practices of the health and safety agencies that employ risk assessment, such as EPA, FDA, OSHA, NRC, CPSC, and others. Risk assessors use the term "population risk" to mean the number of deaths caused by...

Does criminal law deter? Given available behavioral science data, the short answer is: generally, no. Having a criminal justice system that imposes liability and punishment for violations deters.1 Allocation of police resources or the use of enforcement methods that dramatically increase the...

This conference and symposium are important for their ability to make better known the great benefits in the use of restorative processes. Below I try to summarize some of the many promising achievements of those processes, by which I mean to include such practices as victim-offender mediation,...