This article analyzes the question of how the size of bribes should impact criminal sanctions. In contrast to the commonly held view that punishment should increase with the size of the bribe, we argue to the contrary: that the punishment of the bribee should decrease with the size of the bribe. Our conclusion is based both on a philosophical argument and an economic argument. We argue that all else being equal, as an agent’s reservation price for selling public interests decreases, the culpability of the agent willing to receive a bribe increases. In addition, from an economic perspective, the expected social harm of an official acting with a low reservation price for bribes is much greater than one acting with a high reservation price: both the susceptibility of being bribed as well as the potential for social harm is much greater when the reservation price is low.

Day-to-day policing represents a fundamental interface between citizens and states. Yet even in the most capable states, local policing varies enormously from one community to the next. The authors seek to understand this variation and in doing so make three contributions: First, they conceptualize communities and individuals as networks more or less capable of demanding high-quality policing. Second, they present original survey data and semistructured interviews on local policing from over one hundred sixty slums, eight thousand households, and one hundred seventy informal neighborhood leaders in India that contribute to the nascent empirical work on comparative policing and order. Third, they find evidence that well-connected individuals and densely connected neighborhoods express greater confidence in and satisfaction with local policing. Critically, these differences do not appear to be a function of a lower propensity for local conflict but rather of an increased capacity to leverage neighborhood leaders to mediate relations with the police. The combination of analytics and empirics in this article provides insight into the conditions under which individuals and communities experience the police as expropriators of rents or neutral providers of order.

This paper develops a model for a particular type of grand corruption often encountered in developing countries, namely, the sale of government positions by autocratic rulers. A two-stage game is considered, where the autocrat moves first to maximize his revenue from the sale of positions in the cabinet by choosing a price that must be paid by interested politicians. The latter become bureaucrats who maximize their utility from bribe revenues for the given price set by the president. Backward induction yields subgame-perfect equilibrium levels of corruption of the president and bureaucrats. A key insight from this analysis is that conventional tools of fighting corruption become ineffective when corruption at the very top is ignored. The model is distinctive in its treatment of individual moral costs of being corrupt and in its consideration of a revolutionary constraint on the autocrat's choices.

This article proposes a new framework for determining the availability of proprietary remedies for breach of the fiduciary duty of loyalty. It examines the alternative and conflicting arguments put forward in the leading cases, and suggests that they fail to justify their conclusions, either under- or over-estimating the incidence of proprietary relief for fiduciary disloyalty. These shortcomings appear to be the result of inappropriate reliance on familiar equitable formulae, in particular the routine equitable duty to account, the seemingly inescapable maxim that “equity treats as done that which ought to be done”, and the potent rules of tracing.

Where a fiduciary receives a bribe or a secret commission in breach of fiduciary duty it remains controversial whether the bribe or secret commission will be held on constructive trust for the principal. The Court of Appeal has held that in most cases there will only be a personal liability to account. That is incorrect. The duty of the fiduciary is to serve the interest of the principal to the exclusion of his own interest. A fiduciary who keeps a profit for himself abuses the trust and confidence placed in him by the principal. He is bound to hand it over to his principal the moment he receives it. Equity's response to a breach of this duty is to enforce the duty by means of the constructive trust.