Adding to the extensive political and legal debates on data retention, this is the first study to analyse the impacts of data retention on crime prevention in Europe. Using an estimator that captures dynamic effects and is robust to heterogeneous treatment effects, we find a significant negative...

The harmonization of criminal law and procedure is still in its infancy within European Union law and so the relationship between the commercial framework of intellectual property and the criminal enforcement of its standards remains an unsettled and unsettling adolescence. The Proposal for a...

Making the length of a prison sentence conditional on an individual’s offense history is shown to be a powerful way of preventing crime. Under a law adopted in the Netherlands in 2001, prolific offenders could be sentenced to a prison term that was some ten times longer than usual. We exploit...

Efforts to avoid punishment are socially wasteful. Not only do they limit the deterrent effect of punishment but they may actually lead to the paradoxical result that more severe punishment for crime induces more crime. The law has therefore constantly attempted to deter avoidance efforts and...

On 1 September 2006, the European Commission published new Guidelines on the method it will use when setting fines for undertakings that have infringed the competition rules laid down in Articles 81 and 82 of the EC Treaty. This paper discusses the questions what the purpose is of guidelines,...

This Essay examines how professional sports leagues address (apparently increasing) criminal activity by players off of the field or court. It analyzes the power of professional sports leagues and, in particular, the commissioners of those leagues, to discipline wayward athletes. Such discipline...