Physicians who defraud and abuse medical benefit programs provide a unique group of lawbreakers for scientific study. They could be considered to epitomize white collar criminals given their exceedingly high socioeconomic status and power as a professional group. Using official reports and documents, as well as interviews with enforcement and program personnel at both state and federal levels, this study examines the problem of physician fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. Major areas relevant to understanding this phenomenon and its control are presented and policy implications of present knowledge in the area are discussed.
This paper reviews recent American proposals to reform the system for compensating victims of pollution and compares them with the Japanese approach. American proposals fall into three categories: balanced approaches that combine administrative relief with tort reform; proposals that would provide administrative relief but eliminate tort remedies; and proposals to reform tort law which have nothing to say about administrative relief. While American policy-makers are still groping for a solution, in Japan tort law changes provided the rationale for a system of administrative relief that preserves the victims' right to sue. While the Japanese approach is not perfect, the early development of a policy reduced legal and political uncertainties and provided a stable environment for economic growth.
A simulation study demonstrates the influence of perceived justice of a tax amnesty on subsequent tax compliance. In addition, it investigates how the amnesty is perceived to serve the punishment objectives retribution (i.e., giving offenders what they "deserve") and value restoration (i.e., restoring the values violated by tax evasion). Hierarchical regression analysis revealed the expected positive influence of justice on subsequent tax compliance. However, when the influence of punishment objectives was controlled for, the influence of justice disappeared, while retribution and value restoration showed positive effects on post-amnesty tax compliance.
After four decades of steady growth, U.S. states' prison populations finally appear to be declining, driven by a range of sentencing and policy reforms. One of the most popular reform suggestions is to expand probation supervision in lieu of incarceration. However, the classic socio-legal literature suggests that expansions of probation instead widen the net of penal control and lead to higher incarceration rates. This article reconsiders probation in the era of mass incarceration, providing the first comprehensive evaluation of the role of probation in the build-up of the criminal justice system. The results suggest that probation was not the primary driver of mass incarceration in most states, nor is it likely to be a simple panacea to mass incarceration. Rather, probation serves both capacities, acting as an alternative and as a net-widener, to varying degrees across time and place. Moving beyond the question of diversion versus net widening, this article presents a new theoretical model of the probation-prison link that examines the mechanisms underlying this dynamic. Using regression models and case studies, I analyze how states can modify the relationship between probation and imprisonment by changing sentencing outcomes and the practices of probation supervision. When combined with other key efforts, reforms to probation can be part of the movement to reverse mass incarceration.
In a representative UK study (N = 1000) the link between distributive fairness perceptions, outcome favorability, identity, and tax compliance was researched in the context of European transfer payments. Results showed that both forms of tax compliance (i.e., individual and collective EU-tax compliance) were influenced by perceived distributive fairness judgments of EU transfer payments. Fairness itself was related to perceived outcome favorability (i.e., whether their own nation benefits from the EU in financial as well as socio-political terms). Additionally, national identifiers (i.e., people identifying with their own nation, but not with Europe) perceived EU membership as unbeneficial in financial as well as in socio-political terms and thus considered the transfer payments as less fair. Dual identifiers (i.e., people identifying with their own nation and with Europe) perceived the socio-political outcomes from EU membership as more beneficial and thus evaluated the transfer payments as fairer.
Drawing on the legal and social development of the right of individual patients to give informed consent to medical treatment, this article explores some implications of heroic life‐saving measures in medicine that are made possibly by unprecedented advances in medical technology. Talcing cardiac transplantation as its primary example, the article examines the broader effects, both short‐term and long‐term, on family members as well as on the patient of this and similar types of heroic treatment. The author then offers a novel legal theory: where the heroic measure holds the risk of serious or life threatening changes, not just for the patients themselves but for their intimately connected family members as well, those members ought to have a legal right to participate in the informed consent process. The author sketches the contours of such a right and defends it in the face of various objections that may be made to it.
I've looked at life from both sides now from win and lose, and still somehow it's life's illusions I recall. I really don't know life at all.
(“Both Sides Now,” on Colors of the Day: The Best of Judy Collins, Electra Records 1972)
Mandatory reporting legislation has been adopted in every state to insure the protection of children from maltreatment. These statutes have become a significant factor in the lives of mental health professionals who work with children and families. Thirty psychotherapists who had made a recent report of child maltreatment on a client in treatment were interviewed about their experiences with reporting and the consequences of reporting for therapeutic relationships. Several potentially problematic consequences and dilemmas were identified by the therapists, including immediate and long-term effects on the therapeutic alliance and course of therapy, and conflicts of interest in working with children and families.
The right to die may be among the most legally complex and culturally sensitive areas of civil rights to emerge in our time. The thorny issues associated with a terminally ill individual's right to self-determination, and the disposition of individuals who are incompetent to make right to die decisions for themselves, promises to keep all parties involved - health care professionals, medical ethicists, families, lawyers, judges, and state legislators -busy for some time to come. To this point, the state courts have taken the lead in the right to die debate, while the state legislatures have tended to drag their collective feet. This article lays the case law groundwork for right to die decision making, then goes on to assay the legislative responses to the issue that have been rendered in the fifty states.
The decision to participate in the legal process depends in part upon the ideologies of the potential participants. The ideology that has dominated the rights movement during the past two decades is what Stuart Scheingold describes as the myth of rights. But participation in litigation, including rights evolution litigation, has also been colored by other and sometimes conflicting ideologies. Thus the mobilization of legal resources can be seen as the ways participants in litigation cope with multiple ideologies.
This paper looks at the mental patient liberation movement in this way. That movement has been very much affected by a myth of rights ideology, as well as by a liberation ideology that is quite contradictory to the tenets of the myth of rights. The paper documents these ideologies, looks at the way the movement has tried to reconcile them, and shows how this problematic reconciliation affects the nature of mental health rights litigation.
This paper presents an economic analysis of the organ procurement system in the U.S. and examines proposals to alleviate the shortage of transplantable organs. The paper's principal conclusions are: (1) Although non-market solutions deserve the highest priority, demand increases fueled by improvements in transplant technology will probably make some market-based solution necessary in the future. (2) Quality deterioration and coercion will not necessarily be worrisome problems under a market-based procurement system.
During the last decade there have been enormous advances in the transplantation of vital organs - in particular, the kidney, lung, heart, liver and pancreas. Unfortunately, efforts to provide the benefits of these operations to patients have been severely hindered by limitations in the supply of organs -limitations which, in the view of the author, are a consequence of regulation prohibiting the use of market incentives to increase the supply. We conclude that the law should be changed to allow the use of incentives to induce the donation of both present and future interests in cadaver organs.
The reform of German company law by the Control and Transparency Law (“KonTraGâ€) of 1998 reveals politics of corporate governance liberalization. The reforms strengthened the supervisory board, shareholder rights, and shareholder equality, but left intra-corporate power relations largely intact. Major German financial institutions supported the reform’s contribution to the modernization of German finance, but blocked mandatory divestment of equity stakes and cross-shareholding. Conversely, organized labor prevented any erosion of supervisory board codetermination. Paradoxically, by eliminating traditional takeover defenses, the KonTraG’s liberalization of company law mobilized German political opposition to the EU’s draft Takeover Directive and limited further legal liberalization.
In this paper, we develop the concept of a psychological tax contract that goes beyond the traditional deterrence model and explains tax morale as a complicated interaction between taxpayers and the government. Based on crowding theory, the impact of deterrence and re-wards on tax morale is discussed. As a contractual relationship implies duties and rights for each contract partner, sticking to the fiscal exchange paradigm between citizens and the state increases tax compliance. Citizens are willing to honestly declare income even if they do not receive a full public good equivalent to their tax payments as long as the political process is perceived to be fair and legitimate. At the procedural level, a friendly treatment of taxpayers by the tax office in auditing processes increases tax compliance.
The methods of constraining corruption typically adopted in Western industrialized societies, increasing the transparency and accountability of decision-making, and intensifying the enforcement of criminal justice prohibitions, have not always proved to be effective in developing countries. This is not surprising, given that in many of them the resources available for law enforcement are relatively modest, and corruption is deeply embedded culturally. In this paper, I suggest a strategy of reducing the opportunities for corruption, rather than attempting to suppress it altogether. I focus on regulatory institutions and procedures, identifying key aspects to these arrangements, which, if appropriately designed, can achieve this goal. Some of the design strategies that I advocate are inconsistent with the models of regulatory arrangements that Western institutions have been urging developing countries to adopt.
Germany presents the unique case of a society that has been forced to come to terms with its past twice within a fifty-year period. This double experience can contribute to our understanding of the legal processes of lustration. This paper examines a largely neglected dimension of this phenomenon: justice judgments by the general population. Justice judgments about the Nuremberg Trials and denazification after 1945 are compared to analogous procedures that took place in post-communist East Germany after 1989. The study uses two theoretical models in its comparative approach: the Leventhal model, and the “group value” model of procedural justice set forth by Lind and Tyler. The analysis is based on survey data collected by the Office of the Military Government of the U.S. (OMGUS) from 1945 to 1949, and survey data taken in East Germany from 1989 to 1994. The results lend support to the “group value” model for the specific situation of social transition. During both periods justice judgments developed according to analogous patterns. The German experience yields some important lessons for legal policies of lustration.
This article analyzes the effects of party control of the Presidency and Congress, and timing during the President's term on the success of proposals to add new federal judges. Proposals for new judges are more likely to pass if the same party controls the Presidency and Congress than if different parties are in power, and proposals are more likely to pass during the first two years of the President's term than during the second two years. Party control exerts a stronger influence than timing. We also find that the variables interact to produce their influence—the only real chance of adding new judges occurs if the same party controls the Presidency and Congress, and the proposal comes early in the President's term. Under all other conditions, the probability of success is small.
Scholars have long recognized that interest groups realize the importance of the courts as policymakers and as vehicles of social and political change. We examined the amicus curiae participation of the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans for Effective Law Enforcement in criminal cases before the Burger Court from 1969–1982. We found that AELE, a conservative law-enforcement organization, has been the most successful interest group as participant as amid. Moreover, we found that criminal law is yet another area of law in which interest groups are using the Supreme Court to achieve and protect their policy interests.
This paper examines the hypothesis that crime rates and the availability of firearms form a “vicious circle,” so that increases in one lead to increases in the other. Two waves of panel data are used to estimate the relationship between rates of robbery and the relative availability of guns in a sample of large U.S. cities. The results indicate that total robbery rates and gun availability had no influence on each other, but that weapons choice in robbery and gun availability did form a mutually reinforcing cycle. Some implications of these findings are considered.
The recent shift in state policies from Keynesianism to neoliberalism was accompanied by a transformation in state structures. The case of trade liberalization in the United States reveals that this structural transformation is of a judicial nature. In 1974, supporters of free trade successfully shifted authority over the management of protectionist claims from Congress to quasi-judicial bodies in the U.S. executive; in 1994, they successfully strengthened the dispute settlement mechanisms of the World Trade Organization. This judicial transformation indicates a shift from sites where decisions are made by way of political negotiations to sites where judges preside over legal disputes. In the article, I identify the political origins of these judicial transformations and discuss the factors that make judicial sites more favorable to neoliberal policies than political sites.
In this paper, we attempt to clarify some of the confusion that surrounds the measurement of racially polarized voting. This clarification is necessary because the determination of whether or not racially polarized voting exists is often a critical component of the evidence presented in Voting Rights Act (Section 2) litigation. We first show that the correlation coefficient should never be used to measure voting polarization by relating the statistic to the individual behavior that it is supposed to be describing. We then compare the estimates of polarized voting that are provided by other commonly used measures with individual behavior in order to show that the Voting Rights disputes of the 1990s will require different and more carefully specified measures than are currently in use.
This paper examines the role of white-collar crime in the savings and loan crisis. Noting economists' assertions that crime was only a minor ingredient in the crisis, we compare the explanatory power of this “minimal fraud” model to that of its “material fraud” alternative. Bringing together evidence from every major study of thrifts in the 1980s, we argue that only the material fraud hypothesis can make sense of these data. This study demonstrates the utility of deductive reasoning in distinguishing between white-collar crime and ordinary business transactions, thereby potentially contributing to prosecutorial efforts, and helping resolve long-standing methodological dilemmas confronting white-collar criminologists.
