{"id":92,"date":"2016-01-11T15:47:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T15:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-cornell-law-review.pantheonsite.io\/?p=92"},"modified":"2016-01-11T15:47:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T15:47:00","slug":"two-economic-rationales-for-felony-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/2016\/01\/11\/two-economic-rationales-for-felony-murder\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Economic Rationales for Felony Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Critics of the felony-murder rule have long argued that the rule is outdated and unreasonable, and the Su- preme Court since 1982 has interpreted the Eighth Amendment to limit use of the death penalty in felo- ny-murder cases. I present here two economic rationales for the felony-murder rule and show how the Court\u2019s in- terpretation of the Eighth Amendment might burden po- tential victims of felonies. The first rationale is that the felony-murder rule reduces the use of violence in the commission of a felony by forcing the felon to bear the en- tire risk of consequential harm during the course of the felony. The extent to which a \u201ctransaction\u201d (be it a con- tract, a tort, or a crime) is a voluntary exchange is in- versely related to the extent of liability for consequential harm. By extending liability for consequential harm, the felony-murder rule is a tax on violence as an input of criminal production. A second economic rationale for the felony-murder rule concerns team production of crimes. The felony-murder rule gives criminal partners an incen- tive to monitor one another for unnecessary use of vio- lence. One would therefore expect that, by decreasing a criminal\u2019s expected costs of causing consequential harm for an unintended killing during the commission of a felony, the Court\u2019s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment in felony-murder cases increases the incidence of violent felonies. <em>To read more, click <a href=\"https:\/\/www.criterioneconomics.com\/docs\/two-economic-rationales-for-felony-murder.pdf\">here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Critics of the felony-murder rule have long argued that the rule is outdated and unreasonable, and the Su- preme Court since 1982 has interpreted the Eighth Amendment to limit use of the death penalty in felo- ny-murder cases. I present here two economic rationales for the felony-murder rule and show how the Court\u2019s in- terpretation&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/lawreview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}