The Dillon Dilemma: Finding Proportionate Felony-Murder Punishments

A confession of murder: the psychiatrist's dilemma.

The Odd One Out: Felony Murder, the Law of Parties, and the Execution of Non Killers

The focus of this research is in the area of the United States death penalty. More specifically, it examines the use of the felony murder rule and the law of parties at both federal and state level. These areas are considered in light of the 8th Amendment as according to the interpretations of the United States Supreme Court. The approach taken in this article is two dimensional: firstly it con...

The imprisoner ’ s dilemma : the political economy of proportionate punishment . D

The most common heuristic used in economics is not coincidentally entitled the 'prisoner's dilemma'. Several classical economists saw in the social phenomena of crime and punishment an obvious demonstration of the principles of economics. Through changes in the criminal justice system society could deter criminals, thus ridding itself of the baneful costs of crime. Adam Smith (1762) explained t...

A CAS for Finding the Best Strategy for Prisoner’s Dilemma

Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) is a typical type of non-zero-sum game in game theory. Since first raised by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950’s, a lot of research has been done in this area, especially after Robert Axelrod introduced the concept of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma in his book “The Evolution of Cooperation” in 1984. In this project, we have explored a complex adaptive system (CAS...

Modelling proportionate growth

An important question in biology is how the relative size of different organs is kept nearly constant during growth of an animal. This property, called proportionate growth, has received increased attention in recent years. We discuss our recent work on a simple model where this feature comes out quite naturally from local rules, without fine tuning any parameter. The patterns produced are comp...