The purpose of this article is to explain the reasons for adopting, in Italy, the principle of mandatory criminal prosecution. This rule is closely connected to the role and functions of Italian public prosecutors. The supreme guarantee deriving from the rule governing the mandatory status of criminal prosecution is to safeguard the equal treatment of all citizens before criminal law. This is p...

This paper examines opinions by Supreme Court justices of the most significant death penalty cases of the 1970s and 1980s [i. We seek to determine: 1) what main justifications were used by justices to support their own opinions; 2) how inconsistent over these cases were justices in issuing their opinions; and 3) what factors led to changes in opinions across time. We examine three types of inco...

Economic analysis of law is concerned with (a) determination of the effects of legal rules and (b) evaluation of the desirability of the effects of legal rules with respect to well-specified definitions of social welfare. This entry surveys the approach as it applies to basic areas of law -accident, property, contract, and criminal law -as well as to the litigation process. The economic approac...

Intelligence-driven policing strategies are coming to the fore in many countries around the world. This is evidenced by the espousal of the term in the mission statements of police services in Australia and New Zealand, the recent adoption of the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan by the US government, and most notably by the legal commitment to the National Intelligence Model in the U...

In the early 1990s, I spent a couple of years as Chief of the Criminal Division in the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. One of my principal responsibilities was to hear “appeals” from defense lawyers, usually, although not exclusively, in white collar crime cases. These lawyers felt that their clients should not be indicted, or that the plea offer they had rece...

Generally protection against possible litigation and good clinical practice go hand in hand. Situations in which the law has special relevance for people with epilepsy, those who work with them, and their clinicians are reviewed with special reference to the topics of driving, employment, duties of social carers, the clinician's everyday role, the responsibilities of researchers and epilepsy an...

Anders Walker makes several fascinating observations about the contents of textbooks and how they relate to competing visions of what courses in substantive criminal law should seek to accomplish. He advances at least two theses. He states that “every year” (1) “thousands of law students graduate thinking that they have studied criminal law using the case method, when they have not”; and (2) “t...

BACKGROUND Federal law prohibits firearm possession by felons and certain others. Little is known about criminal activity resulting in new ineligibility to possess firearms among persons who have previously purchased them. METHODS Cohort study of handgun purchasers ages 21 to 49 in California in 1991, 2,761 with a non-prohibiting criminal history at the time of purchase and 4,495 with no prio...

Is there such a thing as a criminally “violent brain”? Does it make sense to speak of “the neurobiology of violence” or the “psychopathology of crime”? Is it possible to answer on a physiological level what makes one person engage in criminal violence and another not, under similar circumstances? Current research in law and neuroscience is promising to answer these questions with a “yes.” Legal...