Settlement is a term rarely used in criminal law. Instead, people speak almost exclusively of plea bargaining — i.e., agreements in which a defendant promises to plead guilty in exchange for a prosecutor's promise to seek leniency in charging or sentencing. But a traditional plea agreement is...

For over three decades, therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) has produced rich scholarship highlighting the inseparable connection between law and personal wellbeing. Only recently, however, have TJ scholars begun to explore the influence that the law has on those practicing it. The current research...

The prosecution of criminals is costly, and subject to errors. In contrast to adversarial court procedures, the prosecutor is regarded as an impartial investigator and aide to the judge in inquisitorial justice systems. We show in a sequential prosecution game of a Bayesian court that a...

This paper uses increases in felony larceny thresholds as a negative shock to felony conviction probability to examine the impact of punishment severity on criminal behavior. In the theft value distribution between old and new larceny thresholds ("response region"), higher thresholds cause a 2...

This paper investigates the relationship between the franchise and law enforcement practices using evidence from the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. We find that, following the VRA, black arrest rates fell in counties that were both covered by the legislation and had a large number of newly...

The main goal of this article is to clarify the nature of criminal proceedings and its relationship to civil litigation, insolvency and tax proceedings. The understanding of the purpose of the proceedings, the nature of the liability fulfilled in the proceedings and the principles on which the...

Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge in legislative activity. This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence about the laws' effects, in part because the...

This paper explores theoretically and empirically whether wrongfully convicted defendants receive different punishments than correctly convicted defendants. I develop a theoretical model in which judges observe a signal -- the level of incriminating evidence -- and then engage in `compromise...