And If Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge, Would You Do It Too? : How Developmental Neuroscience Can Inform Legal Regimes Governing Adolescents

Legal models of adolescent autonomy and responsibility in various domains of law span a spectrum from categorical prohibitions of certain behaviors to recognitions of total adolescent autonomy. The piecemeal approach to the limited decision-making capacity of adolescents lacks an empirical foundation in the differences between adolescent and adult decision-making, leading to counterintuitive and inconsistent legal outcomes. The law limits adolescent autonomy with respect to some decisions that adolescents are perfectly competent to make, and in other areas, the law attributes adult responsibility and imposes adult punishments on adolescents for making decisions that implicate their unique volitional vulnerabilities. As developmental neuroscientists discover more about the biological underpinnings of juvenile decision-making, policymakers now have the opportunity to enhance consistency within and across the legal domains that regulate adolescent behavior. To serve this goal, our paper typologizes extant legal regimes that account for the limitations of adolescent decision making, reviews the neuroscientific evidence about how the brain’s developing structures and functions affect decision making, explores case studies of how certain youth behaviors that implicate the adolescent brain’s unique vulnerabilities intersect with the legal system, and proposes a matrix-based approach for the consistent legal evaluation of adolescent behavior

On Optimal Legal Change, Past Behavior, and Grandfathering

When is it socially advantageous for legal rules to be changed in the light of altered circumstances? In answering this basic question here, a simple point is developed -- that past compliance with legal rules tends to reduce the social advantages of legal change. The reasons are twofold: adjusting to a new legal rule often involves costs; and the social benefits of change are frequently only incremental, only in addition to those of past compliance. The general implications are that legal rules should be more stable than would be appropriate were the relevance of past behavior not recognized, and that a policy of grandfathering, namely, of permitting noncompliance, should sometimes be employed. The analysis of these points has broad relevance, applying across legal fields, often explaining what we observe but also indicating possibilities for reform, such as in the regulation of air pollution. The analysis is related to the conventional reliance-based justification for the stability of the law, the literature on legal transitions, and economic writing on optimal legal standards.

Can Neuroscience Help Predict Future Antisocial Behavior?

Part I of this Article reviews the tools currently available to predict antisocial behavior. Part II discusses legal precedent regarding the use of, and challenges to, various prediction methods. Part III introduces recent neuroscience work in this area and reviews two studies that have successfully used neuroimaging techniques to predict recidivism. Part IV discusses some criticisms that are commonly levied against the various prediction methods and highlights the disparity between the attitudes of the scientific and legal communities toward risk assessment generally and neuroscience specifically. Lastly, Part V explains why neuroscience methods will likely continue to help inform and, ideally, improve the tools we use to help assess, understand, and predict human behavior

Legal status of immigrants and criminal behavior: evidence from a natural experiment

We estimate the causal effect of immigrants' legal status on criminal behavior exploiting exogenous variation in migration restrictions across nationalities driven by the last round of the European Union enlargement. Unique individual-level data on a collective clemency bill enacted in Italy five months before the enlargement allow us to compare the post-release criminal record of inmates from new EU member countries with a control group of pardoned inmates from candidate EU member countries. Difference-in-differences in the probability of re-arrest between the two groups before and after the enlargement show that obtaining legal status lowers the recidivism of economically motivated offenders, but only in areas that provide relatively better labor market opportunities to legal immigrants. We provide a search-theoretic model of criminal behavior that is consistent with these results.immigration, crime, legal status

Agents and Brokers as Intermediaries: Their Regulation in Germany

Most markets are characterized by imperfections, mostly market power and limited information. Under these circumstances, intermediaries like real estate agents and insurance brokers play an important role in the economy by facilitating exchange between third parties. As specialized entities they can transmit information, thereby lessening information asymmetries between market participants and can thus enhance the functioning of markets. This special role allows for opportunistic behavior by intermediaries, though. As long as the parties can write enforceable contracts that cover the relevant aspects of the intermediaries behavior, legal regulation is not necessary. In this paper it will be shown, though, that contracts are only partially able to solve possible principalagent problems and that the current legal rules in Germany are inefficient as they can not sufficiently control possible opportunistic behavior. A system of legal rules for intermediaries is sketched, taking into account that severe informa-tional asymmetry is more likely to arise if transactions are infrequent and learning does not take place.

Migration Restrictions and Criminal Behavior: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We estimate the causal effect of immigrants' legal status on criminal behavior exploiting exogenous variation in migration restrictions across nationalities driven by the last round of the European Union enlargement. Unique individual-level data on a collective clemency bill enacted in Italy five months before the enlargement allow us to compare the post-release criminal record of inmates from new EU member countries with a control group of pardoned inmates from candidate EU member countries. Difference-in-differences in the probability of re-arrest between the two groups before and after the enlargement show that obtaining legal status lowers the recidivism of economically motivated offenders, but only in areas that provide relatively better labor market opportunities to legal immigrants. We provide a search-theoretic model of criminal behavior that is consistent with these results.Immigration, Crime, Legal Status

Risky Business

This article is part of an exchange including Anthony Alfieri and William Simon in the Georgetown Law Journal on the implications of law firms\u27 increasing reliance on the concept of risk management as the focus of efforts to ensure ethical conduct by lawyers. A risk management program involves the adoption of various policies and procedures designed to minimize conduct that may lead to individual and firm liability. Conflicts checking procedures, standard terms in engagement letters, and the requirement of a second signature by a disinterested partner on legal opinions are but a few of such measures. On one hand, the risk management paradigm reflects appreciation of the importance of situational incentives and pressures in shaping behavior in organizational settings. This is an advance over conceptions of legal ethics that assume that behavior is principally a function of individual character. Law firms are now major business enterprises, and their systems of rewards and sanctions, as well as their cultures, necessarily influence the conduct of those who work in them. Attending to the ways in which these influences can reinforce or discourage certain types of behavior can help firms establish and maintain environments that enhance the likelihood that lawyers will act ethically. On the other hand, a risk management approach risks inculcating an instrumental view of legal and ethical provisions. To the extent that it conceptualizes ethics as a matter of avoiding liability, risk management may foster the attitude of Holmes\u27s bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which . . . knowledge [of the law] enables him to predict. The bad man wants to avoid punishment, but has no commitment to legal compliance as a good in itself. This can lead to an impoverished view of law and ethics, in which the choice of behavior is contingent on the costs and benefits of a given course of action. This tension in the risk management model has been examined in the context of corporate legal compliance programs, and law firms may draw useful lessons from that research. Social psychologists and management theorists have identified complex connections among program characteristics, group dynamics, individual perceptions and motives, and employee behavior in the business setting. In particular, they have suggested that instrumental and values-based programs proceed on different premises and contribute to compliance in different ways. Instrumental programs can be effective by affecting employee cost-benefit calculations, while values-based programs can foster appropriate behavior because the employee identifies with the values that this behavior expresses. Scholars suggest that compliance programs with both dimensions generally are necessary, but integrating them into a single program requires careful consideration of how they may interact. The article closes by suggesting that this research on corporate programs may offer useful insights for law firms. It cautions, however, that applying this research will need to take account of the ways in which law firms both resemble and are different from typical business corporations

Capital Regulation and Credit Risk Taking : Empirical Evidence from Banks in Emerging Market Economies

The primary purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between bank capital and credit risk taking in emerging market economies. We also investigate the influence of several regulatory, institutional and legal features on the relationship between risk and capital. We apply a simultaneous equations framework following Shrieves and Dahl (1992) and Jacques and Nigro (1997). Our results corroborate the existing findings for US and other industrial economies, putting forward the impact of capital regulation on banks’ behavior. We also show empirical evidence on the role of the regulatory, institutional and legal environment in driving bank capitalization and credit risk taking behavior in emerging market economies.bank capital and risk taking, bank regulation, emerging market economies, regulatory, institutional and legal environment