The Brady Rule May Hurt the Innocent

Mandatory disclosure of evidence (the so-called Brady rule) is considered to be among the most important bulwarks against prosecutorial misconduct. While protecting the generality of defendants in the criminal process, we show that under certain reasonable assumptions this procedural mechanism may hurt innocent defendants by inducing prosecutors to adjust their behavior to their detriment. The main rationale for our thesis is that, if forced to reveal exculpatory information, the prosecutor might not look for that information in the first place, and in turn this could harm the innocent under certain reasonable conditions. We extensively discuss our results in the context of the economic literature on criminal procedure

Judicial disagreement need not be political: dissent on the Estonian Supreme Court

I investigate the non-unanimous decisions of judges on the Estonian Supreme Court. I argue that since judges on the court enjoy high de jure independence, dissent frequently, and are integrated in the normal judicial hierarchy, the Estonian Supreme Court is a crucial case for the presumption that judicial disagreement reveals policy preferences. I analyse dissenting opinions using an ideal point response model. Examining the characteristics of cases which discriminated with respect to the recovered dimension, I show that this dimension cannot be interpreted as a meaningful policy dimension, but instead reflects disagreement about the proper scope of constitutional redress

Is the Spanish Constitutional Court an instrument of the central government against the Autonomous Communities?

This work applies various probit/logit models to a database constructed by the authors, consisting of rulings by the Spanish Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional, TC) resolving positive conflicts of competence between the Central Government and the Autonomous Communities from 1981 to 2014. Our goal is to contrast empirically whether the decisions of the Court respond strictly to legal criteria (the legalist or formalist viewpoint) or if they are determined by political motivations, so that we can state that the TC constitutes an extension, in the jurisdictional milieu, of the central executive power (the realist viewpoint). According to the results of our estimations, we can state that the approach which appears to predominate in the behaviour of the TC is the legalistic one