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Polinsky, A. Mitchell; Shavell, Steven --- "Public Enforcement of Law" [2009] ELECD 454; in Garoupa, Nuno (ed), "Criminal Law and Economics" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009)

Book Title: Criminal Law and Economics

Editor(s): Garoupa, Nuno

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847202758

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Public Enforcement of Law

Author(s): Polinsky, A. Mitchell; Shavell, Steven

Number of pages: 59

Extract:

1 Public enforcement of law
A. Mitchell Polinsky and Steven Shavell*


1. Introduction
Public enforcement of law ­ the use of governmental agents to detect and
to sanction violators of legal rules ­ is a subject of obvious importance.
Police and prosecutors endeavor to solve crimes and to punish criminals,
regulators attempt to control violations of environmental, safety, con-
sumer protection, and financial disclosure laws, and agents of the Internal
Revenue Service seek to enforce the tax code.
The earliest economically oriented writing on the subject of public
law enforcement dates from the eighteenth century contributions of
Montesquieu (1748), Beccaria (1767), and, especially, Bentham (1789).
Curiously, after Bentham, the subject of law enforcement lay essentially
dormant in economic scholarship until the late 1960s, when Becker (1968)
published a highly influential article. Since then, several hundred articles
have been written on the economics of law enforcement.1
The main purpose of our chapter is to present the economic theory
of public law enforcement in a systematic and comprehensive way.2 The
theoretical core of our analysis addresses the following basic questions:
Should the form of the sanction imposed on a liable party be a fine, an


* Stanford Law School and National Bureau of Economic Research; and
Harvard Law School and National Bureau of Economic Research. Research for
this chapter was supported by the John M. Olin law and economics programs at
Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School. An essentially identical version
of this chapter appeared as `The Theory of Public Enforcement of ...