Professor Miriam Baer’s forthcoming article, “Pricing the Fourth Amendment,” to be published in the William and Mary Law Review (2017), was chosen for presentation at the American Law and Economics Association (ALEA) annual meeting at Harvard Law School held in May. The paper was accepted for presentation at the conference from more than 400 submissions.
“Pricing the Fourth Amendment” seeks to address the lack of an adequate remedy for Fourth Amendment violations by police. Existing penalties fail to inspire sufficient compliance within police departments and overlook the problem of detection. Baer addresses this problem by drawing upon the Pigouvian tax concepts, which are intended to correct expected harm outcomes by setting penalties equal to the social cost of the negative outcomes. She examines how these concepts might curtail intentional Fourth Amendment violations by police officers and how this might benefit society.
It is the second paper by Baer that has been selected for presentation at an ALEA annual meeting. Her first article, “Cooperation’s Cost” (88 Wash. U.L. Rev. 903 (2011)), was presented at the association’s 2010 meeting at Princeton University. The ALEA focuses on the advancement of economic understanding of law and related areas of public policy and regulation, and promotes research in law and economics.
Professor Baer teaches in the areas of corporate law, white-collar crime, criminal law, and criminal procedure. Her scholarship, which focuses on organizational wrongdoing in public and private settings, has twice been selected for the prestigious Stanford-Yale-Harvard Junior Faculty Forum. Professor Baer’s work has appeared in many top journals, including most recently the Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, and Yale Law Journal Online.