In this brief Article, I explore the growing empirical evidence in support of the public choice model of judicial decision making. Although legal scholars have traditionally been reluctant to engage in a critical inquiry into the role of judicial self-interest on judicial behavior, recent...

In this paper we report on our experimental findings concerning the differences in decisional treatment between adversarial and inquisitorial systems where the proceedings fail to achieve explicit revelation of decisive facts. In particular, we use our data both: (1) to test the interesting...

Priest and Klein’s 1984 article, “The Selection of Disputes for Litigation,” famously hypothesized a “tendency toward 50 percent plaintiff victories” among litigated cases. Despite the article’s enduring influence, its results have never been formally proved, and doubts remain about...

This paper outlines the findings of a model of plea bargaining with multiple defendants, in which a prosecutor makes plea offer sequentially. It is shown that plea discount can be minimized with sequential offers and that not all of defendants shall be induced to plead guilty. By allowing...

We develop a model of individual prosecutors (and teams of prosecutors) to address the incentives for the suppression of exculpatory evidence. Our model assumes that each individual prosecutor trades off a desire for career advancement (by winning a case) and a disutility for knowingly...