This paper contains the chapters on public enforcement of law and on criminal law from a general, forthcoming book, Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law (Harvard University Press, 2003). By public law enforcement is meant the use of public law enforcement agents -such as police, tax inspectors, regulatory personnel -to enforce legal rules. A number of important dimensions of public law enfor...

We present an image processing software suite, based on the Matlab environment, specifically designed to be used as a forensic tool by law enforcement laboratories in the analysis of crime scene videos and images. Our aim is to overcome some drawbacks which normally appear when using standard image processing tools for this application, i.e. mainly the lack of full control and documentation on ...

Conducted Energy Weapons (CEWs), such as those manufactured by TASER International Inc., are seeing increased use by law enforcement agencies as a less lethal force option; but, at the same time, these weapons are also seeing an increased level of concern in terms of their safety of use. In order to enable consistent evaluation of CEW performance, a systematic protocol for testing the electrica...

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...

Following the September 11 (9/11) attacks, the mission of police and prosecutors expanded dramatically. Before that date, most law enforcement resources were allocated for the post-facto investigation or prospective prevention of specific crimes (like organized crime and drug trafficking investigations), with far fewer devoted to intelligence collection and threat detection to prevent an attack...

Discount medical cards have come under increasing scrutiny by regulators and law enforcement officials as a result of mounting consumer-reported problems. For their study, the authors tested five cards available in the Washington, D.C., metro area; interviewed card company representatives, state attorneys general insurance regulators, and insurance agents; and reviewed court and administrative ...

In this article, we discuss the implications of a recent European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision about the use of retained DNA profiles in criminal cases. Met with polar but equal passion from both the privacy lobby and law enforcement, this case has opened concerns regarding ethics in the nascent science of DNA profiling. Although the technology is touted as the most exciting breakthrou...

When a public official exercises judgment to make a discretionary decision of some significance, taking into account any factors her own common sense, experience, and understanding of the public interest consider relevant, and subsequently is called to account for the soundness of the decision, she performs one of the paradigmatic acts of politics. When a public official makes a decision becaus...