Recent evidence suggests that capital punishment may have a significant deterrent effect, preventing as many eighteen or more murders for each execution. This evidence greatly unsettles moral objections to the death penalty, ...

There have been many efforts to reconcile judicial review with democratic self-government. Some such efforts attempt to justify judicial review if and to the extent that it promotes self-rule. Active Liberty, by Justice ...

Each government agency uses a uniform figure to measure the value of a statistical life. This is a serious mistake. The very theory that underlies current practice calls for far more individuation of the relevant values. ...

Over the coming decades, the increasingly popular “precautionary principle” is likely to have a significant impact on policies all over the world. Applying this principle could lead to dramatic changes in decision making. ...

Excessive borrowing, no less than insufficient savings, might be a product of bounded rationality. Identifiable psychological mechanisms are likely to contribute to excessive borrowing; these include myopia, procrastination, ...

Do moral heuristics operate in the moral domain? If so, do they lead to moral errors? This brief essay offers an affirmative answer to both questions. In so doing, it responds to an essay by Gerd Gigerenzer on the nature ...

How can groups elicit and aggregate the information held by their individual members? There are three possibilities. Groups might use the statistical mean of individual judgments; they might encourage deliberation; or they ...

This review-essay explores the uses and limits of cost-benefit analysis in the context of environmental protection, focusing on three recent books: Priceless, by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling; Cellular Phones, Public ...

Administrative regulations and tort law both impose controls on activities that cause mortality risks, but they do so in puzzlingly different ways. Under a relatively new and still-controversial procedure, administrative ...