This dissertation presents work empirically investigating various aspects of the criminal justice system. Chapter one, coauthored with Chris Rohlfs, examines the judicial bail-setting process and the defendant decision to pay bail. Optimal bail-setting rules must balance the tradeoffs between costs to defendants and costs to society. This chapter develops a model of optimal bail that incorporat...

OBJECTIVE To describe medical negligence and malpractice cases in which a patient with a known penicillin allergy received a beta-lactam and experienced an adverse reaction related to the beta-lactam. DATA SOURCES Lexis-Nexus, Westlaw, and Google Scholar were searched. STUDY SELECTIONS Medical negligence and malpractice cases were eligible for inclusion if they met the following criteria: t...

I ought perhaps to add one further observation about the litigation of such claims. In a recent case the claim was brought against the surgeon and the sister who had been responsible for the counting of the swabs. I suppose that this was done on the basis that the combined duties of the two of them together covered the whole field of activity, within which any negligence connected with the non-...

The Judges’ Journal • Vol. 54 No. 2 rates of treatment retention than addicts participating in treatment voluntarily and lower rates of recidivism than defendants in traditional courts.1 Another reason for the blossoming of mental health courts was a belief by judges and other stakeholders in the logic underlying their design and operations. They assumed that (1) untreated, or inadequately trea...

A growing body of discourse-analytic studies demonstrates that within the legal system, spoken language that undergoes entextualization is transformed in a variety of sociopolitically consequential ways. Through the analysis of a legal case involving the institutional entextualization of incriminating language—an FBI summary log of wiretapped telephone calls between suspected drug dealers—the a...

Persons with dissociative identity disorder (DID) often present in the criminal justice system rather than the mental health system and perplex experts in both professions. DID is a controversial diagnosis with important medicolegal implications. Defendants have claimed that they committed serious crimes, including rape or murder, while they were in a dissociated state. Asserting that their alt...