This study provides estimates of the impact of increased access to home mortgage credit on local crime rates and uses national home mortgage loan origination volume as a shift-share instrument for local home mortgage loan origination volume. The focus of the study is San Diego County from 2007-Q1 to 2013-Q1. The regression estimates indicate that increased access to home mortgage loans during this time period had a statistically significant negative impact on local crime rates: the baseline specification suggests that a ten percentage point increase in the growth in home mortgage loan originations decreases the growth in total crime incidents by approximately 2.75 percentage points. This finding is robust to different model specifications.

This Article argues that the social impact of vandalism must be factored into the expected criminal punishment for this offense. Existing law does so unevenly. Acts of vandalism may have a positive social impact, either as street art or as a form of protected speech, or a negative social impact as costs that preclude the provision of public goods or goods traded upon the basis of access, and not ownership. In general, vandalism cannot be prevented by means of observable security measures; rather, vandalism must be deterred by means of higher expected criminal punishment. A large expected punishment, however, implicates what this article terms the “broken community theory of punishment.” Although broken community effects militate in favor of relatively minimal punishment for vandalism, a negative consequence of this punitive approach is less investment in the infrastructure or physical appearance of urban communities. A number of urban communities may, in fact, benefit significantly from vandalism laws that allow for greater capital investment by more harshly punishing the deliberate damage or destruction of public goods or goods traded upon the basis of access, as vandalism in the first-degree.

Data mining techniques can be used to locate statistical outliers that are incorrectly characterized as evidence of unlawful conduct. Using home mortgage loan data made publicly available by financial regulators, a simple data mining exercise finds that approximately three percent of all lender-MSA pairs (or approximately seven to nine percent of all lending institutions) flagged as having redlined minority neighborhoods is attributable to a failure to correct for the multiple hypothesis testing problem. The false positive rate does not fully explain, however, the estimated high frequency of statistical redlining. Three possible models of information disclosure by regulatory agencies are considered: (1) full information, (2) no information, and (3) limited information. Under a limited information model, litigation serves to correctly implement statistical hypothesis testing: a plaintiff must formulate a hypothesis prior to examination of the data and obtains the information necessary to test this hypothesis only through discovery.

The central claim of the present article is that some form of government intervention is necessary to make telework arrangements sufficiently binding in the long-run for employees living in, or near, city centers to feel comfortable incurring the costs of relocating to more remote, lower-priced areas, and to ensure the long-run financial self-sufficiency of private telework centers, which provide important benefits, not just to employers and employees, but to society generally. The public benefit considered here is the capacity for telework, and telework centers specifically, to provide lower-priced housing alternatives for middle- and high-income earners who choose to live in, or near, the city center to reduce the time spent commuting, but who would otherwise choose to live in more remote, lower-priced areas if commuting costs were lower. As explained, a minimal amount of government intervention is necessary, however, to overcome several key economic challenges that preclude employees from relocating to remote, lower-priced exurban or rural communities, as well as the formation of a new and exciting private-sector enterprise: the privately-operated telework center.

This Article models private ownership as a conflict resolution mechanism and contends that for the Coase Theorem (as defined here) to be consistent, private ownership must yield the Pareto-optimal use of scarce resources among all feasible conflict resolution mechanisms. Conflict over a scarce resource may be better resolved, however, by eliminating the possibility of private ownership and “forcing” parties to share ownership of a contested scarce resource. A corollary to the Coase Theorem is introduced which states: In the absence of transaction costs, the distribution of private and shared ownership is efficient. Provided transaction costs are high and shared ownership is socially-optimal, a role for the courts is suggested wherein de facto shared ownership is established by rendering private property rights random or unclear — judicial behavior that stands in contrast to the normative implications of the Coase Theorem.

This Article identifies a number of problems, both in practice and in theory, in what is denoted here as the “information disclosure model of sentencing regulation.” While the disclosure model places a lack of information at the heart of the problem of inefficient sentencing policy, the present article explains how the problem is better understood, not as informational, but incentives-based. A statutory appropriation requirement is described that seeks to correct an explained incentive to engage in myopic legislative decision-making; specifically, a one-year appropriation is required from a general budget fund into a statutorily-created special reserve fund for any proposed change in sentencing policy projected to increase the correctional population. A survey of existing statutory appropriation requirements is provided and certain best practices are identified; in addition, a novel statutory provision is proposed: monies should be appropriated from the special reserve fund to the general fund if a bill is projected to decrease the correctional population. Such withdrawals from the special reserve fund made in the current fiscal period serve as concrete, immediate evidence of the fiscal benefits of less punitive criminal sentences, where such benefits are often realized only in the long-run, and supply a novel incentive for legislators to engage in forward-looking, fiscally-responsible sentencing policy. The present article further contends that proposed changes in sentencing policy should not be subjected to cost-benefit analysis (as opposed to fiscal impact analysis as required under the statutory appropriation requirement), because the retributive value of a criminal sentence is extremely difficult to measure given the current state of estimation technology.

This article introduces a static, within-country, game-theoretic model of litigated conflict over fundamental rights. The static model suggests that increased judicial interference in the determination of fundamental rights through democratic elections is never social welfare-increasing, even if judicial and political biases run in opposite directions (i.e., if the judicial process is biased in favor of one interest group and the political process is biased in favor of an ideologically-opposed interest group). In addition, the analysis identifies a set of parameters where social welfare increases if the extent to which the litigated conflict over fundamental rights in the society is constitutionalized is decreased (i.e., if litigation effort becomes more expensive and/or less effective). A few real-world examples of the implications of this static analysis are examined, including gun control and the possible future reconstitution of the judiciary in Syria.