Mere Preparation

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2017

Journal Title

Review of Law & Economics

ISSN

1555-5879

DOI

10.1515/rle-2017-0006

Abstract

Acts that are merely in preparation for the commission of a crime are not punished in many jurisdictions. This article provides a wrongful-imprisonment-cost-minimization based justification for this practice. It highlights that conceiving of sufficient proximity based on the trade-off between error-costs and deterrence-benefits may be a more useful alternative to conceptions that rely on physical or temporal proximity to define merely preparatory acts.

First Page

20170006

Volume Number

14

Issue Number

2

Publisher

De Gruyter

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