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Whether and how violence can be controlled to spare innocent lives is a central issue in international relations. The most ambitious effort to date has been the International Criminal Court (ICC), designed to enhance security and safety by preventing egregious human rights abuses and deterring international crimes. We offer the first systematic assessment of the ICC's deterrent effects for both state and nonstate actors. Although no institution can deter all actors, the ICC can deter some governments and those rebel groups that seek legitimacy. We find support for this conditional impact of the ICC cross-nationally. Our work has implications for the study of international relations and institutions, and supports the violence-reducing role of pursuing justice in international affairs.

Over the last decade, federal corporate criminal enforcement policy has undergone a significant transformation. Firms that commit crimes are no longer simply required to pay fines. Instead, prosecutors and firms enter into pretrial diversion agreements (PDAs). Prosecutors regularly use PDAs to impose mandates on firms, creating new duties that alter firms' internal operations or governance structures. DOJ policy favors the use of such mandates for any firm with a deficient compliance program at the time of the crime. This Article evaluates PDA mandates to determine when and how prosecutors should use them to deter corporate crime. We find that the current DOJ policy on mandates is misguided and that mandates should be imposed more selectively. Specifically, mandates are appropriate only if a firm is plagued by policing agency costs—in that the firm's managers did not act to deter or report wrongdoing because they benefited personally from tolerating wrongdoing or from deficient corporate policing. Moreover, only mandates that are properly designed to reduce policing agency costs are appropriate. The policing agency cost justification for mandates that we develop calls into question both the extent to which mandates are used and the type of mandates that are imposed by prosecutors.

We tested whether expert testimony concerning a biomechanism of psychopathy increases or decreases punishment. In a nationwide experiment, U.S. state trial judges (N = 181) read a hypothetical case (based on an actual case) where the convict was diagnosed with psychopathy. Evidence presented at sentencing in support of a biomechanical cause of the convict's psychopathy significantly reduced the extent to which psychopathy was rated as aggravating and significantly reduced sentencing (from 13.93 years to 12.83 years). Content analysis of judges' reasoning indicated that even though the majority of judges listed aggravating factors (86.7%), the biomechanical evidence increased the proportion of judges listing mitigating factors (from 29.7 to 47.8%). Our results contribute to the literature on how biological explanations of behavior figure into theories of culpability and punishment.

The creation of an International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute war crimes poses a real puzzle. Why was it created, and more importantly, why do states agree to join this institution? The ICC represents a serious intrusion into a traditional arena of state sovereignty: the right to administer justice to one's one nationals. Yet more than one hundred states have joined. Social scientists are hardly of one mind about this institution, arguing that it is (alternately) dangerous or irrelevant to achieving its main purposes: justice, peace, and stability. By contrast, we theorize that the ICC is a mechanism to assist states in self-binding, and draw on credible commitments theory to understand who commits to the ICC, and the early consequences of such commitments. This approach explains a counterintuitive finding: the states that are both the least and the most vulnerable to the possibility of an ICC case affecting their citizens have committed most readily to the ICC, while potentially vulnerable states with credible alternative means to hold leaders accountable do not. Similarly, ratification of the ICC is associated with tentative steps toward violence reduction and peace in those countries precisely least likely to be able to commit credibly to foreswear atrocities. These findings support the potential usefulness of the ICC as a mechanism for some governments to commit to ratchet down violence and get on the road to peaceful negotiations.

Criminal prosecution is the first, mandatory and essential, non-public, predominantly written and non-contradictory phase of the criminal proceedings, through which the criminal investigation bodies carry out pre-trial procedural activities. The extension of the criminal prosecution concerns the situation in which it is necessary to modify the procedural framework if, after gathering evidence, the criminal investigation bodies may discover that the person under investigation had committed several acts provided for by criminal law for which the in rem criminal prosecution was not initiated, or that the act under investigation had been committed by several persons who were not considered at the beginning of the investigation. The starting point of this paper is the presentation of the hypotheses, depending on the stage of the procedure in which the procedural framework is modified, as well as the issues that may arise in practice in situations where the prosecution authorities do not proceed with the extension of the criminal prosecution.

The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment. By coarse-graining the spoken word testimony into synonym sets and dividing the trials based on indictment, we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a long-term, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts. We separate this process into the shifting patterns that drive it, determine the relative effects of bureaucratic change and broader cultural shifts, and identify the synonym sets most responsible for the eventual genre distinguishability. This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process.

The key to the growing prominence of prosecutors, both in the United States and elsewhere, lies in the prosecutor's preeminent ability to bridge organizational and conceptual divides in criminal justice. Above all else, prosecutors are mediating figures, straddling the frontiers between adversarial and inquisitorial justice, between the police and the courts, and between law and discretion. By blurring these boundaries, prosecutors provide the criminal justice system with three different kinds of flexibility—ideological, institutional, and operational—and they strengthen their own hands in a legal culture that increasingly disfavors institutional rigidity and hard-and-fast commitments. At the same time, though, the mediating role of the prosecutor frustrates traditional strategies for holding government accountable. The bridges that prosecutors provide—between law and politics, rules and discretion, courts and police, advocacy and objectivity—make curtailing prosecutorial power and taming prosecutorial discretion trickier business than is often suggested, or at least a different kind of business.

For many political observers the successful creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) came as a surprise, as major powers, in particular the United States, had opposed the plans for the ICC. Moreover, the institutional design of the ICC entails enormous sovereignty costs for states but only uncertain benefits. An analysis of the negotiations suggests that the court's successful creation can be attributed to persuasion and discourse within negotiations, that is, a shift in states' interests. The article develops a theoretical model of institutional change that defines the conditions under which persuasion and discourse can affect collective decision making. In particular, this study attempts to show that if (traditionally) weaker actors alter normative and institutional settings of negotiations they can further the chance of persuasion and discourse.

Objective: to develop scientifically sound provisions on community sanctions in the Russian criminal law; to develop proposals for the inclusion in criminal and criminal procedure laws of norms on conditional release from criminal liability and on termination of criminal prosecution due to transferring a person on bail to an organization or institution staff. Methods : a dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena, which allows analyzing their development and functioning, as well as applying general scientific (analysis, deduction, induction, logical method, generalization, synthesis, extrapolation) and special (questioning, historical-legal, comparative, statistical, and formal-legal) research methods. Results: the author determined the place of community sanctions in the Russian criminal law and substantiated the proposal to supplement criminal and criminal-procedural legislation with norms on conditional release from criminal liability and on termination of criminal prosecution due to transferring a person on bail to an organization or institution staff. The normative basis for release from criminal liability is constructed from the objective conditions under which a person is subject to preliminary release. The final release is conditional on the accused’s compliance with the probation conditions. The normative basis for the termination of criminal prosecution is composed of objective and subjective conditions. Moreover, the proposed criminal-procedural norm contains instructions to the court: a) the territorial body of internal affairs and the guarantor should monitor compliance with the probation and training conditions, submitting a report on the subject’s fulfillment of duties, b) the exemption from criminal liability should be canceled, the pledge should be sent to the state revenue and the bailed person should be subject to punishment in case of systematic or malicious non-fulfillment of these duties. Scientific novelty : the article proves the need to consolidate community sanctions in the Russian criminal law. It argues that the criminal and criminal-procedural laws should stipulate norms on conditional release from criminal liability, termination of criminal prosecution due to transferring a person on bail to an organization or institution staff. The author discloses the grounds and conditions for this release/termination, as well as other circumstances aimed at the effective application of these standards. In addition, the article shows legal prospects of collateral surety as a community sanction for a criminal. Practical significance : the main provisions and conclusions set out in the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical, and law-making activities to study and improve the institutions for exemption from criminal liability and termination of criminal prosecution.

In this paper, we show that there are important differences across patent examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. We show that more experienced examiners cite less prior art, are more likely to grant patents, and are more likely to grant patents without any rejections. These results suggest that the most important decisions made by the patent office are significantly affected by the happenstance of which examiner gets an application. They also point to human resource policies as potentially important levers, hitherto neglected, in patent system reform.