Over the last three decades, plea bargaining procedures have been adopted by a large number of jurisdictions worldwide. However, a comprehensive account of the current adoption and use of such procedures is still missing. We survey 174 jurisdictions, finding that 101 of them have a formalized...

Defendants should be judged on the merits of the case, not on prejudice, rumors, or evidence obtained through questionable methods. This is why criminal law of procedure regulates which information can be introduced in a trial. Two types of prohibited evidence are the criminal history of the...

When decision-makers overemphasize salient features under limited attention, biased decisions can result in settings in which decisions should be unbiased. We exploit a sudden shock in the salience of individuals of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands to test the vulnerability of decisions of...

Defendants should be judged on the merits of the case, not on prejudice, rumors, or evidence obtained through questionable methods. This is why criminal law of procedure regulates which information can be introduced in a trial. Two types of prohibited evidence are the criminal history of the...

When decision-makers overemphasize salient features under limited attention, biased decisions can result in settings in which decisions should be unbiased. We exploit a sudden shock in the salience of individuals of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands to test the vulnerability of decisions of...

Over the last three decades, plea bargaining procedures have been adopted by a large number of jurisdictions worldwide. However, a comprehensive account of the current adoption and use of such procedures is still missing. We survey 174 jurisdictions, finding that 101 of them have a formalized...

There is a vigorous debate on whether arrests for domestic violence (DV) will deter future abuse or create a retaliatory backlash. We study how arrests affect the dynamics of DV using administrative data for over 124,000 DV emergency calls (999 calls) for West Midlands, the second most populous...

This work makes sure to examine the three basic concepts: the judicial system, justice and most especially, the law. In furtherance, the work delves into creating a proper nexus between the concepts of justice and law and contends that justice is derived from laws and the former is the primary...

For many decades, courts across the United States have experimented with administering justice in virtual spaces. But the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated those experiments in some jurisdictions and forced other jurisdictions to adopt new technologies to process cases. While trials, particularly...

We study the labor market impacts of retroactively reducing felonies to misdemeanors in San Joaquin County, CA, where criminal justice agencies implemented Proposition 47 reductions in a quasi-random order, without requiring input or action from affected individuals. Linking records of...

We study the effects of laws streamlining access to post-conviction forensic DNA technology ("DNA laws"). We present a conceptual framework in which DNA laws' effects differ by race due to unequal access to non-DNA exoneration technologies. Consistent with the framework's predictions, we find...

The “bargaining in the shadow of the trial” model, which has dominated the legal literature for the last fifty years, argues that the decision to extend, accept, or reject pleas reflects the probable outcome of the trial. Critics of the model note that structural-legal and psychological...

There is a vigorous debate on whether arrests for domestic violence (DV) will deter future abuse or create a retaliatory backlash. We study how arrests affect the dynamics of DV using administrative data for over 124,000 DV emergency calls (999 calls) for West Midlands, the second most populous...

There is a vigorous debate on whether arrests for domestic violence (DV) will deter future abuse or create a retaliatory backlash. We study how arrests affect the dynamics of DV using administrative data for over 124,000 DV emergency calls (999 calls) for West Midlands, the second most populous...

There is a vigorous debate on whether arrests for domestic violence (DV) will deter future abuse or create a retaliatory backlash. We study how arrests affect the dynamics of DV using administrative data for over 124,000 DV emergency calls (999 calls) for West Midlands, the second most populous...

"In democratic societies with criminal justice, a suspected individual is considered innocent until proven guilty beyond any reasonable and sensible doubt. Yet the media and the public--and sometimes also the police and prosecution--may pass a verdict of guilt by blaming and shaming independent...

We provide a selective survey of the literature on profiling by criminal justice agents, including changes in the nature of discrimination resulting from the proliferation of algorithms for prediction. We argue for a taxonomy of harms that differs somewhat from the conventional approach taken by...

A staggering number of Americans experience criminal justice contact each year, ranging from arrest to long-term incarceration. One 2014 Wall Street Journal report estimated that approximately one in three Americans are represented in the FBI’s master criminal database. Many scholars and...

This paper is a discussion of whether single-member judicial panels are an effective way of accelerating the delivery of criminal justice. We use a reform which introduced single-member courts in Greece, where delays in court proceedings are common according to the European Justice Scoreboard...

The Criminal Justice System should be inexpensive, speedy and efficient. This is essential for the smooth growth of the society as it is the primary duty of the state to administer inexpensive and speedy justice to its subjects. In Pakistan the criminal justice system has become expensive and...

I study how voluntary disclosure of information affects outcomes in plea bargaining. A prosecutor negotiates a sentence with a defendant who privately knows whether he is guilty or innocent. The prosecutor can gather evidence regarding the defendant's type during negotiations, and a trial...

This paper presents a model of prosecutors' decision-making processes in which prosecutors (both federal and state) internalize some of the benefits of reducing crime, but also care about developing their own human capital. Since U.S. attorneys make their decision first, they have the...

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...

Racial minorities are disproportionately imprisoned in the United States. This disparity is unlikely to be due solely to differences in criminal behavior. Behavioral science research has documented that prosecutors harbor unconscious racial biases. These unconscious biases play a role whenever...

Critics of plea bargaining have long contended that it has an innocence problem - that the imbalanced and coercive nature of plea negotiations can induce even innocent defendants to plead guilty. While laboratory studies confirm that innocent individuals can indeed be induced to plead guilty,...

Objectives: Government officials use criminal records as proxies for past conduct to decide who and how to investigate, arrest, charge, and punish. But those records may be racially biased measures of individual behavior. This paper develops a theoretical definition of bias in criminal records...

Die Strafrechtsschutzversicherung für Unternehmen dient der Absicherung von Unternehmen und Unternehmensangehörigen vor Kostenrisiken in Straf- und Ordnungswidrigkeitenverfahren. Anhand marktüblicher Versicherungsbedingungen wird dieses - bisher in Literatur und Rechtsprechung kaum behandelte...

In less than a decade, marijuana legalization has gone from unthinkable to seemingly unstoppable. This essay — written for a special issue on improving Arizona’s criminal justice system — discusses how Arizona should best advance marijuana legalization so that it can significantly improve...