Legal consequences of misdemeanor sanctions

The Downstream Consequences of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce otherwise innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains li...

Public Opinion Toward Legal Sanctions for Crimes of Violence

Managing Reputation with Litigation: Why Legal Sanctions Can Work Better than Market Sanctions

A long-lived firm sells a good to a sequence of consumers, where the good’s quality imperfectly depends on the firm’s unobservable e§ort. To solve the moral hazard problem, the firm can promise to pay damages (formal sanctions) or facilitate reputational punishment (informal sanctions). Formal sanctions engender litigation costs and possible court error while informal sanctions involve ine¢cien...

The Effectiveness of Legal Sanctions in Dealing with Drinking Drivers

Legal sanctions, whether administered by the courts or by State licensing agencies, NC central to deterrence-based policies for reducing alcohol-impaired driving. They are the punishments threatened in support of the law’s mandate. Examples are fines, license actions such as suspension and revocation, jail sentences, and alternatives such as community service. Deterrence theory posits that sanc...

Driver Behavior and Legal Sanctions: A Study of Deterrence