Choice and discretion

Within the margins of reasonable foresight, lawmakers have some choice on the degree of specificity of legal rules. Dropping charges After a prosecutor files a charge, the prosecutor can reduce the charge in exchange for a guilty plea or enter a nolle prosequi nol. This is one of many situations where discretion comes into place.

Moreover, prosecutors can also influence defendants' fates by a variety of other decisions that fall within their discretion. Legal decisions made in the legislatures lack precedential value and therefore affect only interested parties.

Over the years, the litigant-driven models of evolutionary change have been challenged on several fronts. A "standard" is the legal or social criterion that adjudicators use to judge actions under particular circumstances. As a general trend, common law jurisdictions are bound by a single court decision, whereas some civilian and mixed jurisdictions only require a continuous line of precedents before recognizing a rule of jurisprudence constante, which courts will follow as an authoritative secondary source of law.

Our existing penal codes are filled with statutes that are unnecessary, over-broad, or poorly drafted, and the effort to enforce the law as written would be impossible without vastly expanded law enforcement and judicial resources, and intolerable if such resources were provided.

The BCIS not only helps to set immigration quotas but also makes individual decisions regarding deportation. Thus, when a prosecutor chooses not to bring a case, it can probably be said that he exercises discretion that has elements of all three of Professor Dworkin's types.

Civil law systems did not undergo such a dramatic shift from customary judge-made law to a formal theory of adjudicative legal rule-making.

We also sometimes use the word in a very strong sense, to mean that the official is simply not bound by any standard at all. The buck has to stop somewhere, and setting additional layers of review simply moves the ultimate decision to another official, without making that official's decision any more likely to be correct.

The article also states that merely being in a different environment from the one the officer lives in or is accustomed to forces the officer to treat it differently. The standard of review applied to appeals from decisions involving the exercise of judicial discretion is " abuse of discretion.

Clearly show your reasoning and the logic in your decision. Even cases that the prosecutor might choose to pursue if the institutions of justice were better funded will be sacrificed if the prosecutor thinks that the overall goal of minimizing serious crime would be better served by investing the necessary resources elsewhere.

To the extent that the prosecutor is the lawyer for the state, her client is not the police department or the individual victim of a crime, but society itself. The court, on the other hand, believes that it is more important to remain deferential to the testator's choice and avoid eligibility hearings, except in rare cases.

The Optimal Scale Problem The law making process is, in a sense, a production function with both fixed and variable costs. Victims, police agencies, and members of the public have not been permitted, for example, to use selective prosecution arguments in an effort to force prosecutors to be more aggressive against favored groups.

As stated before, rules require a high degree of specificity and therefore have higher promulgation costs which may include detailed research Kaplow, Unfortunately, the police have an ability to perform an abuse of discretion without being noticed or regulated by the judicial or legislative community in what is referred to as the "legal shadow".

The evaluation of comparative advantages in lawmaking necessarily rests on the full understanding of the public choice implications of alternative allocations of lawmaking power. In some states, first-time offenders have been sent to jail for life for the possession of large amounts of controlled substances.

Their economic model suggests that the Court should follow precedent when the savings in litigation costs and adjustment costs expected to flow from such a move outweigh the expected error costs associated with the precedent. Do not allow yourself to be unnecessarily rushed.

This includes both the legal and practical consequences.

Prosecutorial Discretion and the Guilty Plea. In spite of previously held beliefs to the contrary, scholars have established that it was not until the midth century that the Common law rule of precedent developed into a formal rule of stare decisis.

This approach would avoid running into the limits of the two-tiered analysis, given the fact that if too many decisions are issued against the original meaning of the rule, the ex ante value of the rule may be corroded with an emerging public distrust in the legislative and judicial functions of government.

Where a defendant has cooperated with the prosecution by providing substantial assistance with the investigation and prosecution of others, the judge is authorized to impose a sentence below the otherwise-applicable guideline range, and even below the statutory mandatory minimum—but only if the prosecutor specifically authorizes the departure from the norm.

Discretion in decision making can be viewed from the perspective of the flexibility and choices granted to the decision maker based on the decision being made.

choice lessons, choice activities, and choice discussions attached to them based on teacher judgment and discretion. These may be good talking points to ask your children about. Sept- Bonding to School 5. Getting to Know Advisory Getting to Know You Time Capsule.

DEMANDS, CONSTRAINTS, CHOICES AND DISCRETION: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK OF ROSEMARY STEWART By: Kevin B.

Lowe Lowe, K. B. (). Demands, constraints, choices and discretion: An introduction to the work of Rosemary may see more choice in your circumstances than initially perceived, and you will be more effective as a consequence. Sentencing Guidelines and Judicial Discretion: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Human Calculation Errors.

Knowing the extent to which legislative guidance influences the actions of regulators is central to institutional design and policy reform. Identification of the impact of guidance is complicated by. ] the variousness of "federal law". competence and discretion in the choice of national and state rules for decision paul j.

mishkin t. legal precedents and judicial discretion (public choice) A prominent European legal theorist, commenting on the notion of legal logic, cynically wrote: I have to confess that, as time passes, my distrust for legal logic increases (Calamandrei, ).

choice i.e., accrual management, smoothing, and avoidance of earnings decreases. Third, we consider the role of a number of corporate governance mechanisms on managers’ accounting discretion .

Choice and discretion