RESUMEN: El texto defiende un estándar probatorio general de “prueba preponderante” para la determinación de los hechos en materia de sanciones administrativas. Para ello analiza la distribución de ...riesgos de error que ofrece este y otro estándar y defiende una específica distribución de ellos, coherente con los fines del derecho administrativo.
Candidates for federal office may loan an unlimited amount of their own money to their campaign committees. However, under section 304 of the 'Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act' of 2002 (BCRA), a ...candidate may not be repaid more than $250,000 of such loans from contributions made to the campaign after election day. Last Term, in 'FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate', the Supreme Court held that section 304 violates the First Amendment by burdening core political speech without proper justification. In doing so, 'Cruz' evinces the Court's trend toward First Amendment absolutism and establishes a heightened standard of proof for restrictions on speech. In 'Cruz''s wake, laws once thought to be consistent with the First Amendment are at risk of being struck down.
Insurance law and incomplete contracts Bourgeon, Jean-Marc; Picard, Pierre
IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc,
12/2020, Volume:
51, Issue:
4
Journal Article, Paper
Peer reviewed
Open access
We analyze how insurance law can mitigate moral hazard by allowing insurers to reduce or cancel coverage in some circumstances. We consider an incomplete contract setting in which the insurer may ...obtain information related to the policyholder's behavior through a costly audit of the circumstances of the loss. Court decisions are based on a standard of proof such as the balance of probabilities. We show that an optimal insurance law brings efficiency gains compared to the no-audit case. We also highlight the conditions under which the burden of proof should be on the insured, provided that insurers are threatened with sanctions for bad faith.
In the decision to the British appeals case
Re H
(Minors), Judge Lord Nicholls, talking about criminal behavior, stated that “that the more serious the allegation the less likely it is that the event ...occurred”. There is actually quite a bit of discussion about the conclusions that should be drawn from this observation in the literature, but I have not found much discussion of the question whether the observation is
right
. I find this surprising, and in this essay I want to inspect this question.
Criminals often engage in costly avoidance to lower their likelihood of being detected and sanctioned. Such avoidance, in turn, affects the optimal enforcement policy. This paper studies how the ...optimal standard of proof is affected by a specific type of avoidance, namely investments by guilty defendants to mimic innocent individuals. We show that when mimicking is possible the optimal standard of proof is weaker than preponderance of the evidence. This stands in contrast to much of the literature, which shows that non-deterrence costs usually cause the standard of proof to be stronger than preponderance. Thus, it is important not to ignore criminals’ secondary behavior when determining the optimal standard of proof.
•Offenders may invest in mimicking compliant individuals to reduce their likelihood of being found liable.•These investments are increasing in the gap between the likelihood of correct and false convictions.•The preponderance of the evidence (POE) standard maximizes deterrence.•Nevertheless, social welfare is maximized by a standard weaker than POE which generates lower mimicking costs compared to POE.
Researchers have identified intolerance of uncertainty (IU) as a dysfunctional thought that contributes to OCD. Case examples of OCD suggest that uncertainty and anxiety persist despite low ...likelihoods of feared outcomes. In this study we examined how people with OCD react to minimal amounts of uncertainty relative to non-anxious individuals and a clinical comparison group of people with social anxiety disorder (SAD).
We created a questionnaire to measure the distress people feel when there is only minimal uncertainty regarding a given outcome and if they prefer situations with the certainty of negative outcomes in the present versus living with uncertainty. Part two of our study tested whether IU is related to performance on neutral and idiographic versions of the Beads Task.
OCD and SAD subjects reacted to hypothetical scenarios involving minimal risk with greater negative affect than did non-anxious subjects; however, after repeating analyses to account for comorbid disorders, OCD subjects’ scores did not differ from those of non-anxious subjects. Only SAD subjects showed a preference for negative information in the present versus the uncertainty of a future outcome. Part two of our study revealed that self-reported IU was only marginally associated with performance on the neutral Beads Task.
High rates of comorbidity made it difficult to identify the specific relationship of IU with other anxiety disorders.
IU for general, non-OCD specific scenarios may not figure prominently in all individuals with OCD, but rather may play a larger, more consistent role in anxiety disorders such as SAD. Additionally, the number of beads or words viewed on Beads Task may be an inadequate behavioral measure of IU.
•We measured how people with OCD and SAD feel about minimal uncertainty.•We tested if IU is related to neutral and idiographic versions of the Beads Task.•OCD and SAD subjects reacted more negatively to minimal risk than non-anxious ones.•SAD subjects preferred negative outcomes in the present versus uncertainty.•IU was only marginally associated with performance on the neutral Beads Task.
Desde los años 60, la ciencia reguladora se entiende como el ámbito científico que genera conocimiento relevante para diseñar y evaluar políticas públicas y prácticas reguladoras. Este ámbito ...presenta diferencias epistémicas respecto de la ciencia académica estándar, debido a la existencia de factores contextuales particulares. Estos incluyen elementos como una mayor implicación de agentes externos, variaciones en los recursos disponibles, notable susceptibilidad ante valores no epistémicos o la presencia de agencias reguladoras y sus procedimientos asociados. Los factores contextuales conllevan la aplicación de determinados cursos de acción para la práctica científica conocidos como políticas epistémicas, que establecen estándares y cargas de la prueba no coincidentes con los de la ciencia académica. En última instancia, estas particularidades conducen a la aceptación de hipótesis diferentes y, por lo tanto, al establecimiento de distintos contenidos científicos.
Despite being widely used, few studies have assessed the utility of the San Diego definition of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The purpose of this study was to evaluate pathologists’ ...application of the San Diego definition in all cases of sudden unexpected death in infancy (SUDI) that occurred in Queensland, Australia, between 2010 and 2014. Key coronial documents of 228 cases of SUDI were reviewed independently by three reviewers and classified according to the San Diego definition. Clear guidance regarding the evidentiary threshold for classification and interpretation of the San Diego definition was provided. All reviewers classified cases identically in 202 cases (88.6%). Consensus was achieved on the classification of the remaining 26 deaths following case discussion. After review, 79 cases were classified as SIDS, a one third reduction compared with the original classification, mainly due to a high probability of accidental asphyxia. The number of cases classified as undetermined (USID) almost doubled (75/228, 32.9%), and there was more than a fivefold increase in cases classified as asphyxia (43/228, 18.9%). Natural conditions decreased by approximately one third (21/228, 9.2%). This study demonstrates that with clear guidelines for interpretation, the San Diego definition can be applied reliably, with discrepancies resolved through a process of peer review.
Public attitudes, negative stereotypes, and stigma are essential to cultural narratives about the membership status of people with intellectual disability and people who have immigrated to the United ...States. With a concern for the exclusion of people from participation in democratic societies, this mixed methods study explores conceptual links between the criminalization of intellectual disability and immigration. The overlay of criminal justice norms and practices onto civil law without parallel adoption of safeguards results in the misallocation of risk to individuals with out-group membership status. This study offers conceptual analysis by applying to the policy issue, standard of proof of intellectual disability in death penalty cases, the framework of membership theory and related constructs present in the scholarly literature on immigration policy. Exact measures logistic regression is used to predictively link states’ standards of proof of intellectual disability with immigration status. It was found that the best model predicting the probability of a Higher than Preponderance standard of proof of intellectual disability in death penalty cases was a two-variable model consisting of Prior Ban and Unauthorized Immigration. This study presents recommendations for research and policy practice.
Prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) are databases that can be used by healthcare professionals to identify problematic drug‐seeking behavior. Law enforcement officers can also obtain PDMP ...information, raising significant privacy concerns. In this paper, I use regression analysis to explore the association between state PDMP protections and law enforcement information requests. I find that while requiring law enforcement to meet a specified standard of proof prior to accessing PDMP information is associated with fewer requests, other methods of regulating law enforcement access are not. These findings provide important and novel evidence about law enforcement behavior in response to privacy protections.
PDF
