Until a few decades ago, the police were mainly a reactive bureaucratic organization that moved from one criminal event to the next, according to the degree to which the outside world required its services. Since then the police have abandoned the emphasis on law enforcement with regards to petty crime and public order. More recently the police have developed community policing as an important ...

Behavioral economic analysis of law is about bringing recent research about behavior and choice together with classical law and economics. In this essay we assess its relevance for the theory of optimal law enforcement. It is our view that criminal law is an area where behavioral analysis has a role to play. Notwithstanding the results so far provided by the behavioral approach are somehow disa...

In this commentary, I explore two questions raised by Angelotta and Appelbaum's study. First, I offer an English legal perspective on the protection of children from their mothers, looking at both civil (family) and criminal law. Second, I discuss the idealization of motherhood that is implied by the prosecution of pregnant women; the denigration of those who fail this ideal; and the way that i...

The mother lode of criminal responsibility scholarship is a unitary theory of criminal excuses, that is, a persuasive normative account of why the criminal law adjudges actors to be blameless despite their having engaged in prohibited conduct. The law’s other criminal defenses do not readily lend themselves to unitary normative accounts or, if they do, they rest on normative accounts that are s...