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The rule of law has become a big idea in economics. But it has had its difficulties

The system costs taxpayers nothing, Mr. Kreins said, and it is exceptionally effective at ensuring that defendants appear for court.

Mr. Spath’s experience confirms that.

If Mr. Spath considers a potential client a good risk, he will post bail in exchange for a nonrefundable 10 percent fee. In a 35-month period ending in November, his records show, Mr. Spath posted about $37 million in bonds — 7,934 of them. That would suggest revenues of about $1.3 million a year, given his fee.

Mr. Spath, who is 62, has seven bail agents working for him, including his daughters Tia and Mia. “It probably costs me 50 grand a month to run this business,” he said.

Mr. Spath hounds his clients relentlessly to make sure they appear for court. If they do not, he must pay the court the full amount unless he can find them and bring them back in short order.

Only 434 of his clients failed to appear for a court date over that period, and Mr. Spath straightened out 338 of those cases within the 60 days allowed by Florida law. In the end, he had to pay up only 76 times.

That is a failure rate of less than 1 percent.

But he had just taken a $100,000 hit. “Everything I worked for this year, I lost because of that one guy,” he said. “If I write a bad bond, it takes me 17 to make it right.”

Dr. Smith said the "dogmatism" of his testimony stemmed partly from a view early in his career that he was on the prosecution's side.

Other witnesses have indicated that pathologists are supposed to maintain a scientific neutrality.

"I honestly believed it was my role to support the Crown attorney. I was there to make the case look good," he said. "It took me a long time, years, to acknowledge my role was not to make the Crown's case Â… but to be much more impartial."

Dr. Smith was certified as a pediatric pathologist, but confirmed that he received virtually no training in forensic pathology: applying the science to criminal and other legal matters.

"It was self-taught, it was minimal," he said of his knowledge of the field. "In retrospect, I realize it was woefully inadequate."

He also said he was "profoundly ignorant" of the proper way to present his opinions in court. The outside experts were highly critical of his court testimony.

Winnipeg Transit driver William Bordynuik was in bed when his sleep turned into a nightmare.

But the eight people that burst into his home, ordered him to the floor and handcuffed him weren't bogeymen -- they were Winnipeg police officers armed with a search warrant and looking for cocaine.

Bordynuik says not only was there never any cocaine in his home, police themselves would have realized that if they had investigated before breaking through his door on Dec. 28, 2006.

In fact, the only white substance police found during the search -- a clear bag with white round stuff in it -- turned out to be nothing more than mothballs.

Now Bordynuik, who has no criminal record, is suing the unknown Winnipeg police officers and former chief Jack Ewatski for damages.

Bordynuik said the raid has caused him to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, nervous shock, depression, sleep loss and a personality change.

"This guy is an upstanding citizen," Martin Pollock, Bordynuik's lawyer, said.

"Where's the surveillance here? They could do wiretaps. It appears they didn't. What kind of information did they have?"

The lawsuit, filed in Court of Queen's Bench last week, also claims police kept yelling 'where are the drugs?' even though Bordynuik replied he didn't even know what cocaine looks like.

Fonterra's new Effluent Indicator System (EIS) came into force from the start of the 2007/08 season on July 1.

Under the scheme, regional councils can notify Fonterra about dairy farmers who are "persistently and critically" non-compliant with effluent management rules.

Fonterra sustainable production manager, John Hutchings, told the Dominion Post that both farmers are being tracked under the EIS.

Mr Hutchings said Fonterra was activating the process for two farmers but said it was too early to make public who they were.

"We've just got to make good on this stuff. Our shareholders have said, `We can't afford to be taken down by the bad bastards who bring this damage to the whole industry'," he told the newspaper.

David Brown and Dana Chatwell found their family home alone behind the barricades -- on the native-controlled side -- during acrimonious and ongoing confrontations over disputed Six Nations land near Hamilton.

Life in their isolation has meant having to present a "passport" to natives when leaving or returning to their house, having their car searched by masked men at barricades, being refused access to their property, having no mail or garbage removal and enduring threats, noise and their house being ransacked.

All the while, police refused to intervene, including ignored 911 calls, they said.

In a $10-million lawsuit against the provincial government and the Ontario Provincial Police, the couple claims the refusal to enforce the law caused Ms. Chatwell to abandon her in-home business, Mr. Brown to lose his job and their teenaged son to live elsewhere.

"If the OPP cannot go on that property and the [native] chiefs can't discipline these protesters, when the sun goes down behind my home, where does that leave my family?" asked Mr. Brown, yesterday.

The Caledonia land dispute saga took a violent new twist last week, when natives from the Six Nations reserve used wooden beams to beat Sam Gualtieri, a construction contractor working one kilometre away from the Douglas Creek Estates property, which native protesters have occupied for the last 18 months. Unlike the protesters, Mr. Gualtieri was doing nothing illegal. His only crime was renovating a house for his daughter and her fiance. But native thugs have proclaimed that anyone working in the area must get their approval (i.e., pay protection money) first. As in all situations where a central authority refuses to apply the rule of law, mafia-like groups have rushed into the vacuum and proclaimed themselves a law unto themselves.

Mr. Gualtieri's brother claims the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officers on the site "stood there, and they did not intervene" while the beating took place. We don't know whether this is true. But it is certainly credible given the precedents over the last year and a half. Since the crisis began, Dalton McGuinty's government has been petrified of taking decisive action, lest the Toronto media compare his actions to those of Mike Harris's government during the Ipperwash Crisis of 1995. At numerous points during the Caledonia standoff, the OPP has been ordered to sit on their hands despite numerous provocations by native protesters.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

If repossessing a used Chevrolet can be tricky, consider retrieving the Aztec Express, a 700-foot cargo ship under guard in Haiti as civil unrest spread through the country.

Only a few repo men possess the guile and resourcefulness for such a job. One of them is F. Max Hardberger, of Lacombe, La. Since 1991, the 58-year-old attorney and ship captain has surreptitiously sailed away about a dozen freighters from ports around the world.

"I'm sure there are those who would like to add me to a list of modern pirates of the Caribbean, but I do whatever I can to protect the legal rights of my clients," said Hardberger, whose company, Vessel Extractions in New Orleans, has negotiated the releases of another dozen cargo ships and prevented the seizures of many others.

His line of work regularly takes him to a corner of the maritime industry still plagued by pirates, underhanded business practices and corrupt government officials, waters the Aztec Express sailed right into.

An Alberta common-law couple failed to convince the Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday to consider whether the man can legally contract out of his parental duties toward the woman's child, who was conceived through artificial insemination because the man did not want a baby.

The court, by convention, did not give reasons for declining to grant leave to appeal in the closely watched case of John and Jane Doe.

The refusal to consider the appeal means the Calgary couple is bound by a decision last February in the Alberta Court of Appeal, which ruled against the couple crafting a contract absolving John Doe of parental responsibility.

The studies' conclusions drew a philosophical response from a well-known liberal law professor, University of Chicago's Cass Sunstein. A critic of the death penalty, in 2005 he co-authored a paper titled "Is capital punishment morally required?"

"If it's the case that executing murderers prevents the execution of innocents by murderers, then the moral evaluation is not simple," he told The Associated Press. "Abolitionists or others, like me, who are skeptical about the death penalty haven't given adequate consideration to the possibility that innocent life is saved by the death penalty."

Sunstein said that moral questions aside, the data needs more study.

Critics of the findings have been vociferous.

Some claim that the pro-deterrent studies made profound mistakes in their methodology, so their results are untrustworthy. Another critic argues that the studies wrongly count all homicides, rather than just those homicides where a conviction could bring the death penalty. And several argue that there are simply too few executions each year in the United States to make a judgment.

"We just don't have enough data to say anything," said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the Wharton School of Business who last year co-authored a sweeping critique of several studies, and said they were "flimsy" and appeared in "second-tier journals."

"This isn't left vs. right. This is a nerdy statistician saying it's too hard to tell," Wolfers said. "Within the advocacy community and legal scholars who are not as statistically adept, they will tell you it's still an open question. Among the small number of economists at leading universities whose bread and butter is statistical analysis, the argument is finished."

Several authors of the pro-deterrent reports said they welcome criticism in the interests of science, but said their work is being attacked by opponents of capital punishment for their findings, not their flaws.

"Instead of people sitting down and saying 'le

There's a thriving industry built on the scientific selection of jurors—but the jury is out on just how accurate it is, or whether it gives legal adversaries an edge.

In Florida during the years in question, Lee and McCrary found, the probability of being sentenced to prison for an offense jumped from 3 percent to 17 percent at exactly age 18. This tees up the answer to the economists' main question: How does the tendency to commit crimes vary around the 18th birthday, when the odds of a prison-sentence punishment jump? The answer is, hardly at all. While the probability of being arrested each week falls steadily from age 17 to age 19, there is no sizeable decrease in the arrest rate that corresponds to the bump up to an adult penalty in the weeks before and after people turn 18. To an economist, this is odd. At the grocery store, in weeks that Coke is on sale and Pepsi is not, consumers respond immediately. Coke sells out while Pepsi languishes on the shelf.

If the prospect of longer prison sentences does not deter young Floridians from committing crimes, prison still prevents some crime via the more mundane channel of locking them up—incapacitating rather than deterring them, in the lingo of criminal justice theory. Lee and McCrary see this in the re-arrest data they study. One-fifth of the people arrested the week before their 18th birthday were rearrested within a month. By contrast, only a tenth of the people arrested a week after their 18th birthday were rearrested within the same time period. The reason? The 18-year-old offenders spent more of the month behind bars (because they received longer sentences, on average) and therefore were not free to commit the crimes that would have gotten them re-arrested.

Two Ontario men who suffered "catastrophic" injuries after they were thrown from a car driven by an intoxicated friend were awarded $24-million yesterday, one of Canada's largest-ever personal injury judgments.
Yesterday, Mr. Justice Bruce Glass of the province's Superior Court of Justice ruled that Corey Greig and Ford Credit Canada Leasing Ltd., which owned Mr. Greig's pickup truck, must pay the huge sum to Derek Gordon and Ryan Morrison, both 25.
The men were not wearing seat belts at the time of the crash.

Police used computer experts to obtain confidential material, and are also believed to have approached Number 10's internet suppliers to gain access to government email records.

Scotland Yard became suspicious that potentially vital information was being withheld after it twice asked Downing Street for all emails, letters and other material relating to the system of awarding peerages. Concerns grew among officers that there had been a cover-up.

They were deeply frustrated by the "very slim" file of documents that was handed over — and decided to obtain further evidence by their own devices, senior sources close to the inquiry have revealed.

It is understood that John Yates, the Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner leading the investigation, authorised officers to use all lawful and legitimate means to discover whether information was being withheld.

It turns out that the explanation, at least in part, is one that should put a smile on the face of all free-marketers and rational choice theorists: criminal defendants, just like any other consumers of services, appear to be making choices based on their rational assessments of costs and benefits. But, you might ask, do criminal defendants ever really have a choice between public defenders and private counsel? It appears many do.

Our data suggested that, contrary to the law’s rather binary notion of indigency, a large chunk of felony criminal defendants are what we have called “marginally indigent.” They could, if they had to, tap hidden resources, or the resources of family and friends, to retain private lawyers. But what drives that decision? Just what you’d expect from any rational consumer of criminal defense services: a combination of the seriousness of the offense and the likelihood of conviction.

Imagine a guilty, marginally indigent defendant facing a relatively minor felony (for which he will most likely get probation). Now add to the mix the fact that his crime was captured on videotape, meaning he has a small chance of avoiding conviction. It is unlikely such a defendant would deplete his and his family’s and friends’ resources to hire a private lawyer when he could get a free public defender to achieve the same result.

At the other end of the spectrum, imagine a marginally indigent defendant charged with first degree murder, and imagine that he is innocent. Wouldn’t that defendant do everything in his power to marshal the resources to hire a private lawyer, if he believed, rightly or wrongly, that the private lawyer were more likely to achieve an acquittal?

In other words, marginally indigent defendants who choose public defenders tend to be guilty. And of course if that’s true, it’s not at all surprising that public defenders would achieve less favorable outcomes.

Despite the FSA's solid support of Bowland and its insistence that no rules had been broken, the Department of Health bowed to the commission's diktat. On October 16 it rushed through a statutory instrument, the Curd Cheese (Restriction on Placing on the Market) Regulations 2006, to take immediate effect. Section 3 read "No person shall place on the market any curd cheese manufactured by Bowland Dairy Products Limited".

Never before, it is believed, has a statutory instrument been issued in Britain directed at closing down a single named company (breaching the ancient principle of British law that "the law must be blind", i.e. it must be general in application, not directed at any specific individual or body).

When Lord Willoughby de Broke recounted this chilling story last week, eloquently supported by others, including Lord Greaves, a Lib Dem who lives near Mr Wright's plant, peers were visibly horrified. The only defence that Lord Warner, as junior health minister, could muster (apart from seriously misrepresenting the terms of Vesterdorf's judgment) was to plead that failure to implement the commission's decision "would constitute a serious breach of the UK's obligations under the EC Treaty". For truth, justice, the rule of law and Britain it was a black day.

A court in China has used a software program to help decide prison sentences in more than 1,500 criminal cases, a Hong Kong newspaper said on Wednesday.

The software, tested for two years in a court in Zibo, a city in the eastern coastal province of Shandong, covered about 100 different crimes, including robbery, rape, murder and state security offenses, the South China Morning Post said, citing the software's developer, Qin Ye.

"The software is aimed at ensuring standardized decisions on prison terms. Our programs set standard terms for any subtle distinctions in different cases of the same crime," Qin was quoted as saying.

As an attorney, Gass is sympathetic with the industry position. The prospect of implementing a new technology like SawStop raises the potential of investing frightening amounts of capital to re-tool existing production lines.

“It’s not a simple issue for the manufacturers,” he explains. “They have whole product lines of saws. Once the genie is out of the bottle, there’s a huge product liability problem for any manufacturer who doesn’t have this. People will ask, ‘Why didn’t you have this on the saw you sold to us?’”

Product liability experts also hint at another reason for the industry’s lukewarm reaction to SawStop. Today’s saw manufacturers, they say, aren’t legally responsible for the horrific injuries associated with table saws. The unwritten rule applying to such situations is “use it at your own risk,” they say.

“Most of the time, legal cases are dismissed before they get to a jury because the judge agrees with the saw maker that this is an activity entered into by adults who have a general knowledge of the propensity of sharp edges to cut,” notes James T. O’Reilly, a professor of law and product liability expert at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.

Gass believes that the “use it at your risk” legal structure steals the motivation of saw manufacturers to adopt new safety technology. “What you have here is an economic disconnect,” Gass says. “The power tool companies are not paying for the injuries. You and I are paying in terms of medical premiums and workers’ comp. If the (power tool) industry had to pay, this technology would have been on those saws a long time ago.”