Legal decision-making in criminal contexts includes two essential functions performed by impartial "third parties:" assessing responsibility and determining an appropriate punishment. To explore the neural underpinnings of these processes, we scanned subjects with fMRI while they determined the appropriate punishment for crimes that varied in perpetrator responsibility and crime severity. Activ...

Many philosophers endorse deterrence justifications of legal punishment. According to these justifications, punishment is justified at least in part because it deters offenses. These justifications rely on empirical assumptions, e.g., that non-punitive enforcement can’t deter or that it can’t deter enough. I’ll challenge these assumptions and argue that extant deterrence justifications of legal...

OBJECTIVE One justification for a statutory ban on physical punishment is that passage of such legislation changes public attitudes towards the use of this form of parental discipline. The experience in Sweden is often cited as an example of legislation which changed public opinion. The aim of this brief article is to review the public opinion findings in Sweden in order to evaluate in greater ...

It is a commonly held intuition that increasing punishment leads to less crime. Let's move our glance from the punishment for the crime itself to the punishment for the attempt to commit a crime, or to the punishment for the threat to carry it out. We'll argue that the greater the punishment for the attempt to rob, i.e. for the threat, “give me your money or else...”, the greater the number of ...

the applicability of executing the qiṣāṣ punishment through donation of organs is a novel topic and at the same time influential in safeguarding the blessings of human health and life. the legitimacy of this procedure requires delving into legal views and opinions. the renowned majority of imāmī jurists believe that the procedure of executing punishment in blood-vengeance has no topicality (rel...

The paper provides an economic rationale for punishing repeat offenders with increasing sanctions. We analyse the optimal intertemporal punishment scheme within an infinite game framework. The legal authority is assumed to minimize the social cost of punishment under the constraint of keeping delinquency at a maximal tolerable level. This level is exogenously determined. JEL classification: K14

insulting to prophet or imam is obscene, shameful and insupportable for any muslim, so the person who insults must be killed. any where that there is no islamic government or it has not been ordained any rule about killing insulter; killing insulter has no retaliation (punishment). but when legislator especially issued a rule for killing punishment in article513 for the crime of insulting to pr...