Case Quotas in the Court: an Analysis of the Allocation of Judicial Resources

Abstract

The paper develops analytic criteria for the selection of the optimal "mix" of trials in a congested court system. It describes a model generating case quotas for major categories of crime that maximizes the reduction in the overall social losses due to crime. The empirical results for the District of Columbia suggest that scarce court time should be heavily allocated to trials for robbery and burglary.

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