Are state laws, regulatory practices, and allocation of public resources for enforcement reflected in perceptions by bar owners/managers that they will be cited or sued if they fail to exercise care? Among policies, which ones have the greatest impact on risk perceptions and, in turn, on such behaviors? We used data on laws, law enforcement, and regulations in the same areas as the bars to dete...

We investigate the effect of target familiarity on the construction of facial composites, as used by law enforcement to locate criminal suspects. Two popular software construction methods were investigated. Participants were shown a target face that was either familiar or unfamiliar to them and constructed a composite of it from memory using a typical 'feature' system, involving selection of in...

This essay, prepared for The Law and Economics of Irrational Behavior (Francesco Parisi and Vernon Smith eds., 2004), examines implications of bounded rationality for traditional economic analysis of public law enforcement. A brief application to the enforcement of employment discrimination laws by public agents is offered. * Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. Thanks to Louis Kaplow, Steven ...

This paper explores the relationship between the intensity of competition in product markets and firms’ incentives to lower their production costs by illegal means. Our framework combines a Salop circle with a crime model à la Becker, allowing us to differentiate between several measures for the intensity of competition. We establish that more firms in the industry (i.e., lower entry costs) red...

One conclusion that emerged from our discussions with the emergency re­ sponder community is that protecting the health and safety of law enforcement responders may be the most challenging personal protection task within the community.1 A major part of the challenge stems from the difficulties in charac­ terizing the hazards that law enforcement responders face. These difficulties are compounde...

The discovery of DNA technology is considered one of the most revolutionary and beneficial contributions to the modern industrialized world. Not only has it led to formidable advances in medicine and genetic biology, but, in the past ten years, DNA technology also has become an important tool to law enforcement personnel and the legal community. Since 1986, police officers and lawyers have used...

Traffic and environmental conditions (e.g., weather conditions), which frequently change with time, have a significant impact on crash occurrence. Traditional crash frequency models with large temporal scales and aggregated variables are not sufficient to capture the time-varying nature of driving environmental factors, causing significant loss of critical information on crash frequency modelin...

Recent controversies about the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping of international calls have overshadowed equally disturbing allegations that the government has acquired access to a huge database of domestic call traffic data, revealing information about times, dates, and numbers called. Although communication content traditionally has been the primary focus of concern about ov...

The public does not want all laws enforced. In the closed society of law enforcement institutions, police discretion, the conspiracy of silence, the lack of an administration with integrity, and susceptible law enforcement officers contribute to the development of corruption from occupational deviance. Corruption in law enforcement agencies may have similar roots in business, law, medicine, and...