Defining and Punishing Offenses Under Treaties

Social Norms Versus Social Responsibility: Punishing Transgressions under Conflicting Obligations

Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Acknowledgments We thank Nicholas P. Lovrich and the Division of Government Studies and Services at Washington State University for the opportunity to work wit...

Status offenses.

Public policy is unsettled with regard to juvenile status offenders--children who are subject to juvenile court jurisdiction for noncriminal behavior such as running away from home, incorrigibility, truancy, and curfew violation. In 1974, the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act initiated a national policy of status offender "deinstitutionalization," supporting the developmen...

Religion and unforgivable offenses.

The value of forgiveness is emphasized in many religions, but little is known about how members of distinct religious cultures differ in their views of forgiveness. We hypothesized and found that Jews would agree more than Protestants that certain offenses are unforgivable and that religious commitment would be more negatively correlated with belief in unforgivable offenses among Protestants th...

Climate treaties and approaching catastrophes

If the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty, and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs, treaties can easily coordinate countries’ behavior so as to avoid the threshold. Where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower, treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe, sustaining only modest cuts in emis...

Punishing Collective Entities