A Core of Agreement
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We are deeply gratified by this exchange with Professors John Darley, Paul Robinson, Owen Jones, and Robert Kurzban. We have benefited a great deal from their research, and this encounter only adds to our appreciation. Their work has always been exceptional in its devotion to empirical exploration and experimentation. We are grateful to them for taking the time to share their thoughts with us and with the readers of this journal. In responding, we are unsurprised to find that we are in agreement with quite a bit of what they have to say.
Each year, more than half of criminal defendants subject to the career offender sentencing enhancement are those with prior drug convictions. Because the goal of the Sentencing Guidelines is to “inject transparency, consistency, and fairness” into federal sentencing, clarity on how courts should assess decriminalized drug offenses as § 4B1.1 predicates is needed to restore uniformity to the system and satisfy the Guidelines’ original goals. This Essay calls upon the Sentencing Commission to clarify its intent, place time limits on decriminalized drug predicates for § 4B1.1, and restore greater uniformity to the system.
All coauthors contributed equally. We thank The University of Chicago Law Review for this Symposium on “Law and Economics vs. Law and Political Economy” and John Cooper for excellent research support, and we are grateful to participants in the 2025 University of Chicago Law Review Symposium for thoughtful comments and suggestions.
All coauthors contributed equally. We thank The University of Chicago Law Review for this Symposium on “Law and Economics vs. Law and Political Economy” and John Cooper for excellent research support, and we are grateful to participants in the 2025 University of Chicago Law Review Symposium for thoughtful comments and suggestions.
All coauthors contributed equally. We thank The University of Chicago Law Review for this Symposium on “Law and Economics vs. Law and Political Economy” and John Cooper for excellent research support, and we are grateful to participants in the 2025 University of Chicago Law Review Symposium for thoughtful comments and suggestions.
Experiments sometimes get a bad rap. Critics allege that they don’t illuminate how the real world works, are subject to p-hacking and manipulation, and often don’t study the most important populations of interest. This Essay examines historical uses of experiments to generate knowledge for legal academia. Recently, experiments have become associated with law and economics as part of a broader coupling of quantitative empirical work with law and economics. But experimentation is a highly adaptable, if imperfect, research method that can support causal claims and test assumptions that are useful across many legal theories, including law and political economy. The Essay discusses the strengths, limits, and future directions of experiments as a mode of legal research.
I thank John MacDonald for helpful comments. I do not thank him for the unhelpful ones.
The law and political economy (LPE) movement claims concern for marginalized communities as a motivation for its crime agenda. However, efforts to defund police, elect progressive prosecutors, and eliminate prisons are likely to generate large costs for the very communities LPE scholars say they care about. Existing empirical analyses demonstrate that Black individuals benefit disproportionately from the deterrence provided by police. This Essay also provides new evidence that progressive prosecutors have put Black people in lethal danger. Finally, it argues that there are reasons to believe that decarceration would not be costless for the Black community.