Law Enforcement as Discretion and Legal Process

Psychotherapy as law enforcement.

Legal doctrines do not stand still, but instead evolve and tend to grow and to spawn what law school academicians fondly term progeny. Tarasoff is no exception. In an expanding list of court decisions, psychiatric patients are being convicted of crimes by virtue of actions by their psychiatrists or psychotherapists purportedly based on the duty to warn. One recent case has featured surreptitiou...

Semantic Workflows in Law Enforcement Investigations and Legal Requirements

Investigations conducted by law enforcement agencies depend on information that is obtained from a variety of sources, internal and external to the organization. Considering that investigations frequently span multiple jurisdictions and government agencies with varying objectives and powers, assessing and ensuring compliance with their policies and the legal framework is challenging. We present...

Fiscal Rules and Discretion under Self-Enforcement∗

We study a fiscal policy model in which the government is present-biased towards public spending. Society chooses a fiscal rule to trade off the benefit of committing the government to not overspend against the benefit of granting it flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value of spending. Unlike prior work, we characterize rules that are self-enforcing: the government must p...

1 Discretion , Rule of Law , and Rationality

When John Adams crafted wording that the state shall establish "a government of laws and not of men" into the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1780, he did not specify precisely where, in the real world, the boundaries of law should end and where officials should begin to exercise discretion in interpreting and enforcing the laws. The founding fathers gave us organizing prin...

Legal Enforcement of Morality