Doron Teichman’s research while affiliated with Hebrew University of Jerusalem and other places

I. Introduction The Behavioral Code [hereinafter: the book] is a timely and important contribution to the legal literature.¹ It brings together a wide body of knowledge in psychology, economics, criminology, and sociology, and ties it to the biggest policy challenges many jurisdictions currently face. Written in a meticulous and detailed fashion, it highlights the limitations of many existing practices, and draws a path toward a future of informed policymaking. It should be noted at the outset that we are in complete agreement with the main arguments presented by Van Rooij and Fine in their book. The current reliance on heavy sanctions—most notably lengthy incarceration periods—may lead to unjust results in specific cases and is often ineffective. Furthermore, in many cases, turning to behaviorally informed policy interventions could help facilitate policymakers’ goals, and promote compliance with legal rules at low costs while using less intrusive measures. Notwithstanding this principled agreement, this contribution to the symposium will highlight some of the limitations of the arguments presented in the book. More concretely, we will develop two related themes. First, we will argue that when moving forward with behaviorally informed reforms, one should not neglect the critical role that traditional penal policies play in the overall scheme of crime control. Second, we will highlight some of the methodological and normative limitations associated with behavioral interventions, and present a framework for their evaluation.

Previous studies of judgment and decision‐making in adjudication have largely focused on juries and judges. This body of work demonstrated that legal training and professional experience sometimes affect attitudes and mitigate the susceptibility to cognitive biases, but often they do not. Relatively few experimental studies examined the decisions of prosecutors and defense lawyers, although they play a major role, especially in legal systems where prosecutors have a broad discretion in charging decisions, courts' discretion regarding sentencing is constrained, and plea bargains abound. This study directly compares laypersons, law students, and legal practitioners—including prosecutors and defense lawyers—in terms of their attitudes about the criminal justice system and their cognitive biases. It was found that the outcome bias and the anti‐inference bias influenced all groups similarly, but an irrelevant anchor only impacted the decisions of laypersons and law students, and not those of legal professionals. Prosecutors were significantly more inclined to judge a behavior as negligent and reach factual conclusions supporting a conviction. However, the hypothesis that the susceptibility of prosecutors and defense lawyers to cognitive biases would be affected by their role was not borne out. The article considers possible explanations for the reported findings, and discusses their policy implications.

This Article presents a theory whereby criminal punishments are routinely distributed in proportion to the weight of the evidence mounted against the defendant. According to this theory, the law relaxes the stringent decision threshold in criminal trials—beyond a reasonable doubt—by creating easy-to-prove evidentiary offenses. These offenses, in turn, are associated with less severe sanctions, thus creating a de-facto proportional liability regime. Against that backdrop, the Article examines the legal duty to report criminal activity to the authorities. As the analysis shows, while legal scholars analyzing such duties have focused on the paradigmatic case in which an innocent bystander, friend or family member is unwittingly exposed to information about a crime, in practice these duties are rarely used in such cases. Rather, reporting duties are used to prosecute suspected accomplices whose involvement in the commission of the actual crime is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus, offenses imposing a reporting duty on criminal activity turn out to be part of the general framework of accomplice liability, and are used to apply less severe sanctions in cases of evidentiary uncertainty.

This Article explores which tools the legal system should use to promote pro-social behaviourBehaviour in the face of the COVID-19COVID-19pandemicPandemic. More specifically, the Article compares nudgesNudges (i.e., choice-preserving, behaviourally informed tools that encourage people to behave as desired) and mandatesMandates (i.e., obligations backed by sanctions that dictate to people how they must behave), and it argues that mandates rather than nudges should serve in most cases as the primary legal tool used to promote risk reduction during a pandemic. The Article nonetheless highlights the role nudges can play as complements to mandates, and surveys numerous nudges that were used by regulators around the world.

The economic analysis of law assumes that court decisions are key to incentivizing people and maximizing social welfare. This article reviews the behavioral literature on court decision making, and highlights numerous heuristics and biases that impact judges and jurors and cause them to make decisions that diverge from the social optimum. In light of this review, the article analyzes some of the institutional features of the court system that may help minimize the costs of biased decisions in the courts.

The use of nudges—“low-cost, choice-preserving, behaviorally informed approaches to regulatory problems”—has become quite popular at the national level in the past decade or so. Examples include changing the default concerning employees’ saving for retirement in a bid to encourage such saving; altering the default about consent to posthumous organ donation to increase the supply of organs for transplantation; and informing people about other people's energy consumption to spur them to reduce theirs. Nudges are therefore used to promote the welfare of the people being nudged, and of society at large. However, the use of nudges has sparked a lively normative debate. When turning to the international arena, new arguments for and against nudges can be raised. This essay focuses on the normative aspects of using nudges in the international arena.

This Article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the contribution of behavioral science to the legal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the descriptive level, the Article shows how different psychological phenomena such as loss aversion and cultural cognition influenced the way policymakers and the public perceived the pandemic, and how such phenomena affected the design of laws and regulations responding to COVID-19. At the normative level, the Article compares nudges (i.e., choice-preserving, behaviorally informed tools that encourage people to behave as desired) and mandates (i.e., obligations backed by sanctions that dictate to people how they must behave). The Article argues that mandates rather than nudges should serve in most cases as the primary legal tool used to regulate behavior during a pandemic. Nonetheless, this Article highlights ways in which nudges can complement mandates.

Many human decisions, ranging from the taking of loans with compound interest to fighting deadly pandemics, involve phenomena that entail exponential growth. Yet a wide and robust body of empirical studies demonstrates that people systematically underestimate exponential growth. This phenomenon, dubbed the exponential growth bias (EGB), has been documented in numerous contexts, across different populations, using both experimental and observational methods. Despite its centrality to human decision making, legal scholarship has thus far failed to account for the EGB. This Article presents the first comprehensive study of EGB and the law. Incorporating the EGB into legal analysis sheds new light on legal measures that are already in use, and highlights new solutions to numerous problems that the law strives to solve. More concretely, the EGB calls for the introduction of new disclosure duties that would assist people grasp the long-term implications of their choices; the imposition of new mandatory rules that would minimize the exploitation of the EGB by savvy profit-maximizing entrepreneurs; and the adoption of new debiasing techniques that could improve policymakers’ decisions. Keywords: exponential growth bias, disclosures, pensions, consumer credit, compound interest, pyramid schemes, pandemic, global warming, behavioral law and economics, debiasing