CrimProf Blog

Top-Ten Recent SSRN Downloads in Criminal Law eJournal

are here.  The usual disclaimers apply.

Rank	Paper	Downloads
1.	Consent and Coercion Kimberly Kessler Ferzan University of Virginia, School of Law Date Posted: 31 Jan 2019 [2nd last week]	162
2.	Criminalizing the Victim: Ending Prosecution of Human Trafficking Victims Jessica Aycock Texas Tech University School of Law Date Posted: 14 Feb 2019 [3rd last week]	133
3.	Making Federalism Great Again: How the Trump Administration's Attack on Sanctuary Cities Unintentionally Strengthened Judicial Protection for State Autonomy Ilya Somin George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School, Faculty Date Posted: 07 Mar 2019 [4th last week]	98
4.	Death by Numbers: Why Evolving Standards Compel Extending Roper’s Categorical Ban Against Executing Juveniles From 18 to 21 John H. Blume, Hannah Freedman, Lindsey Vann and Amelia Hritz Cornell Law School, Independent, Justice 360 and Cornell University - Law School Date Posted: 25 Mar 2019 [new to top ten]	91
5.	Inheritance Forgery Reid K. Weisbord and David Horton Rutgers Law School and University of California, Davis - School of Law Date Posted: 08 Feb 2019	89
6.	FOSTA: A Hostile Law with a Human Cost Lura Chamberlain Fordham University - Fordham Law Review Date Posted: 06 Feb 2019 [7th last week]	72
7.	Are Collateral Consequences Deserved? Brian Murray Seton Hall Law School Date Posted: 04 Feb 2019 [new to top ten]	71
8.	Mitigations: The Forgotten Side of the Proportionality Principle Paul H. Robinson University of Pennsylvania Law School Date Posted: 01 Mar 2019	64
9.	Proportionality Theory in Punishment Philosophy: Fated for the Dustbin of Otiosity? Michael Tonry University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - School of Law Date Posted: 25 Feb 2019	58
10.	Criminal-Justice Apps Adam M. Gershowitz William & Mary Law School Date Posted: 24 Feb 2019	48

Top-Ten Recent SSRN Downloads in Criminal Procedure eJournal

are here.  The usual disclaimers apply.

Rank	Paper	Downloads
1.	Evaluating the Impacts of Eliminating Prosecutorial Requests for Cash Bail Aurelie Ouss and Megan T. Stevenson University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School, Faculty Date Posted: 25 Feb 2019	596
2.	Feigned Consensus: Usurping the Law in Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma Prosecutions Keith A. Findley, D. Michael Risinger, Patrick D. Barnes, MD, Julie Mack, David A. Moran, Barry Scheck and Thomas Bohan University of Wisconsin Law School, Seton Hall University School of Law, Stanford University - Pediatric Radiology and Neuroradiology, Pennsylvania State University - Penn State Hershey Medical Center, University of Michigan Law School, Professor of Law, Cardozo Law School, Co-Director, Innocence Project and American Academy of Forensic Sciences Date Posted: 05 Feb 2019	492
3.	Why Robert Mueller’s Appointment As Special Counsel Was Unlawful Steven G. Calabresi and Gary Lawson Northwestern University - Pritzker School of Law and Boston University School of Law Date Posted: 31 Jan 2019	138
4.	Criminalizing the Victim: Ending Prosecution of Human Trafficking Victims Jessica Aycock Texas Tech University School of Law Date Posted: 14 Feb 2019 [5th last week]	132
5.	Juvenile Life Without Parole in North Carolina Ben Finholt, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi and Kristen Renberg NC Prisoner Legal Services, Duke University School of Law, Duke University School of Law and Duke University School of Law Date Posted: 19 Feb 2019 [4th last week]	132
6.	Probable Cause Pluralism Andrew Manuel Crespo Harvard Law School Date Posted: 19 Mar 2019 [new to top ten]	118
7.	Is Police Behavior Getting Worse? The Importance of Data Selection in Evaluating the Police Aurelie Ouss and John Rappaport University of Pennsylvania and University of Chicago - Law School Date Posted: 31 Jan 2019	116
8.	An Empirical Study of Terrorism Charges and Terrorism Trials in Canada between September 2001 and September 2018 Michael Nesbitt University of Calgary, Faculty of Law Date Posted: 07 Feb 2019 [9th last week]	106
9.	Theories of Prosecution Jeffrey Bellin William & Mary Law School Date Posted: 19 Mar 2019 [new to top ten]	93
10.	Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044 I. Bennett Capers Brooklyn Law School Date Posted: 11 Feb 2019	90

Slattery on The Myth of Retributive Justice

Brian Slattery (York University - Osgoode Hall Law School) has posted The Myth of Retributive Justice (In W. Cragg ed., Retributivism and Its Critics (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992), pp. 27-34) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

In fairy tales, villains usually come to a bad end, snared in a trap of their own making, or visited with a disaster nicely suited to their particular villainy. Read a story of this kind to children and you will be struck by the profound satisfaction with which this predictable of events is greeted. Yet, if children cheer when the villain is done in, they are just as satisfied when the hero manages to get the villain by the throat but takes pity and spares him. These tales of retribution and mercy, even reduced to their barest bones, seem to have an intrinsic significance; they strike some inner chord, resonate with something fundamental in our inarticulate understanding of the world, reveal something about the basic make-up of the world. This is not to suggest that they are 'realistic' in the ordinary sense. They do not tell us what 'really happens' in the world of experience, where the villain all too often flourishes and the innocent are trampled underfoot. Rather, fairy tales reveal to us the injustice of the human world by testifying to the true nature of justice. If we did not know that villains ought to get their comeuppance, we would have no reason to think it wrong that they often escape to enjoy their spoils. Tales of retribution and mercy speak of the reality of a world beyond the world of everyday experience; so doing, they show the world of experience in its true light. In the best sense of the word, they are 'myths': stories that, even when told in their simplest form, carry a profound inner significance.

Braithwaite on Crime as a Cascade Phenomenon

John Bradford Braithwaite (Australian National University (ANU) - Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS)) has posted Crime as a Cascade Phenomenon on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

Braithwaite and D’Costa’s (2018) Cascades of Violence deploys South Asian data to conclude that war tends to cascade across space and time to further war, crime to further crime, war to crime, and crime to war. This article sketches why it is analytically fertile to view crime as a cascade phenomenon. Once we see crime through the cascade lens, we can imagine how to more effectively cascade crime prevention. Like crime, crime prevention often cascades. Braithwaite and D’Costa (2018) show how peacemaking can cascade nonviolence, how it cascades nonviolent social movement politics, and vice versa. Seeing crime through the cascade lens opens up fertile ways of imagining a macrocriminology of crime control. Self-efficacy and collective efficacy are hypothesized as catalysts of crime prevention cascades in such a macrocriminology. Alcoholics Anonymous is one model for how to institutionalize the scaling up of cascades of prevention. Other movements for building recovery capital such as the social movement for restorative justice might follow the AA lead, rejigging their strategies toward institutionalizing the scaling up of self-efficacy into collective efficacy that prevents cascades of crime. Australian successes with gun control and drunk driving point to the importance of explicitly connecting evidence-based microcriminology to a macrocriminology of cultural transformation. More structurally, building collective efficacy in families, schools and primary work groups may cascade collective efficacy into neighborhoods and vice versa.

Pillsbury on Relational Justice

Samuel H. Pillsbury (Loyola Law School Los Angeles) has posted What Is Relational Justice? on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

The relational harms of crimes of violence should be met with relational remedies; this is the aim of relational justice. Sexual and other forms of violence do grave harm to personal relations and relational capacities. Wrongdoers may, and should, be blamed for acts of disregard for the basic relational good of others. The final aim of relational justice is the return of those hurt by violence to full belonging in community, and if possible, the return of perpetrators as well. This will alter predominant views of punishment for serious crimes. Adopting a relational justice perspective should change how guilty pleas are taken and sentencing hearings are structured. Relational justice promises better recognition of sexual violence by emphasizing the relational nature of harm and wrongdoing. Relational justice also provides a new perspective on race and class discrimination in criminal justice through its emphasis on the connectedness of persons and groups in community and basic obligations to look out for the relational good of others.

Kaesling on Privatising Law Enforcement in Social Networks

Katharina Kaesling (University of Bonn - Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study 'Law as Culture') has posted Privatising Law Enforcement in Social Networks: A Comparative Model Analysis (Erasmus Law Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2018) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

These days, it appears to be common ground that what is illegal and punishable offline must also be treated as such in online formats. However, the enforcement of laws in the field of hate speech and fake news in social networks faces a number of challenges. Public policy makers increasingly rely on the regulation of user generated online content through private entities, i.e. through social networks as intermediaries. With this privatization of law enforcement, state actors hand the delicate balancing of (fundamental) rights concerned off to private entities. Different strategies complementing traditional law enforcement mechanisms in Europe will be juxtaposed and analysed with particular regard to their respective incentive structures and consequential dangers for the exercise of fundamental rights. Propositions for a recommendable model honouring both private and public responsibilities will be presented.

Masera on Police Militarization

Federico Masera (University of New South Wales) has posted Police Safety, Killings by the Police and the Militarization of US Law Enforcement on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

The debate over police use of military equipment often revolves around the supposed tradeoff between increasing police safety and reducing killings by the police. I rely on institutional features that exogenously determine the distribution of military equipment to US police departments to show that there is no such tradeoff: police militarization increases killings by the police and reduces police safety. Each year police militarization results in 64 additional killings by the police, 12,400 police officers assaults and 2,600 police officers injuries.

Bellin on Theories of Prosecution

Jeffrey Bellin (William & Mary Law School) has posted Theories of Prosecution (California Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

For decades, legal commentators sounded the alarm about the tremendous power wielded by prosecutors. Scholars went so far as to identify uncurbed prosecutorial discretion as the primary source of the criminal justice system’s many flaws. Over the past two years, however, the conversation shifted. With the emergence of a new wave of “progressive prosecutors,” scholars increasingly hail broad prosecutorial discretion as a promising mechanism for criminal justice reform.

The abrupt shift from decrying to embracing prosecutorial power highlights a curious void at the center of criminal justice thought. There is no widely-accepted normative theory of the prosecutorial role. As a result, prosecutors are increasingly viewed as the criminal justice system’s free agents, deploying the powers of their office as they see fit to serve constituents, public safety or, most broadly, the cause of justice.

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Crespo on Probable Cause Pluralism

Andrew Manuel Crespo (Harvard Law School) has posted Probable Cause Pluralism (Yale Law Journal, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

The constitutionality of a search or seizure typically depends upon the connection between the target of that search or seizure and some allegation of illegal behavior — a connection assessed by asking whether the search or seizure is supported by probable cause. And yet, central as probable cause is to the Fourth Amendment’s administration, no one seems to know what it means, or how it operates. Indeed, the Supreme Court has gone so far as to insist that it is “not possible” to define the term, holding instead that the probable cause inquiry entails no more than the application of “common-sense” to “the totality of the circumstances.” That doctrinal approach is routinely criticized as an “I know it when I see it” mode of jurisprudence that is ill equipped to safeguard civil liberties in the face of competing and weighty law enforcement demands. Viewed charitably, however the Supreme Court’s refusal to elaborate on the meaning of probable cause stems from an understandable desire for doctrinal flexibility in the face of widely varying law enforcement-civilian interactions.

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Segev on The Realm of Criminal Law

Re'em Segev (Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Faculty of Law) has posted Reasons For and Against Criminalization: Discussion of the Realm of Criminal Law (Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies, Vol. 18, pp. 16-37, 2018) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

Antony Duff claims that a political community has a reason to criminalize all and only actions that are both morally wrong and “public”, namely, violate the values of relevant community. In what follows, I consider several arguments against Duff’s claims. My general objection is that, in the relevant context, all of the elements that Duff considers as morally significant in themselves – the moral status of actions (as wrong or permissible), their “public” (or “non-public”) nature and the (criminal) law itself – are morally significant only if and when they are derived from more basic factors (that are morally significant in themselves). For illustration, I assume in what follows, with respect to the most basic factors, that there are foundational reasons to promote well-being and distributive or retributive justice, for example, that there is a reason to prevent the suffering of a virtuous person (who does not deserve to suffer in this way).

Joe on Regulating Mass Prosecution

Irene Joe (University of California, Davis - School of Law) has posted Regulating Mass Prosecution on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

Efforts to address our nation’s criminal justice crisis have hit a standstill; legislative solutions have proven inadequate and increased funding for public defenders is politically impractical. Virtually everyone agrees that there is a problem: we incarcerate more people than any other developed nation and that imposes a significant cost on society. The conventional solutions to this crisis focus on the legislative or public defense side of the equation – urging decriminalization of certain behaviors by state legislatures and increased funding for indigent defenders. These proposed solutions are important but, alone, insufficient, for reasons that are all too predictable: a lack of political will to do right by indigent defendants.

 

In this paper, I advance a solution that is at the same time novel and achievable. My proposed solution is novel because it focuses on an institutional actor that has, to this point, received comparatively little attention in the debates over mass incarceration – the prosecutor. It is achievable because it does not require new legislation that would, in turn, depend upon political support that is unlikely to materialize. Instead, the solution is already a part of our legal backdrop: prosecutors should be required to comply with the same ethical rules that govern all other lawyers. And those rules, I argue, are violated when prosecutors exercise their charging discretion in ways that contribute to massive public defender caseloads.

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Ewing on Prior Convictions as Moral Opportunities

Benjamin Ewing (Queen's University - Faculty of Law) has posted Prior Convictions as Moral Opportunities (American Journal of Criminal Law, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2019) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

This paper presents a novel theory of why recidivists appear to have a weaker moral complaint about punishment than first-timers: we implicitly assume that crime and punishment give people valuable “moral” opportunities to reflect upon the sources of their fallibility as agents and take steps to guard against them. This helps to secure them against succumbing to crime, thereby diminishing the reasonableness of their objection to future punishment. Though compelling in theory, this line of thought is problematic in practice because ex-offenders’ opportunities to avoid reoffending are arguably worsened by criminogenic prison conditions and collateral consequences of conviction to a greater extent than they are improved by the moral opportunities inherent in crime and punishment for it. The moral link between ex-offenders’ opportunities and recidivist “premiums” implies we should bolster the former or scale back the latter.

Prescott & Starr on Expungement's Effects

J.J. Prescott and Sonja B. Starr (University of Michigan Law School and University of Michigan Law School) have posted Expungement of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge of legislative activity. This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence about the laws’ effects, in part because the necessary data (such as sealed records themselves) have been unavailable. We were able to obtain access to deidentified data that overcomes that problem, and we use it to carry out a comprehensive statewide study of expungement recipients and comparable non-recipients. We offer three key sets of empirical findings. First, among those legally eligible for expungement, just 6.5% obtain it within five years of eligibility. Drawing on patterns in our data as well as interviews with expungement lawyers, we point to reasons for this serious “uptake gap.” Second, those who do obtain expungement have extremely low subsequent crime rates, comparing favorably to the general population—a finding that defuses a common public-safety objection to expungement laws. Third, those who obtain expungement experience a sharp upturn in their wage and employment trajectories; on average, within two years, wages go up by 25% versus the pre-expungement trajectory, an effect mostly driven by unemployed people finding jobs and very minimally employed people finding steadier or higher-paying work.

Tenzer on Social Media and Venue

Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer (Pace University - School of Law) has posted Social Media, Venue and the Right to a Fair Trial on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

Judicial failure to recognize social media’s influence on juror decision making has identifiable constitutional implications. The Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial demands that courts grant a defendant’s change of venue motion when media-generated pretrial publicity invades the unbiased sensibility of those who are asked to sit in judgment. Courts limit publicity suitable for granting a defendant’s motion to information culled from newspapers, radio, and television reports. Since about 2014, however, a handful of defendants have introduced social media posts to support their claims of unconstitutional bias in the community. Despite defendants’ introduction of negative social media in support of their claims, these same courts have yet to include social media in their evaluation of pretrial publicity bias. But social media is media, and as this article demonstrates, trial court judges faced with deciding change of venue motions have a constitutional obligation to include social media in their evaluations.

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Delfino on Pornographic Deepfakes

Rebecca Delfino (Loyola Law School Los Angeles) has posted Pornographic Deepfakes — Revenge Porn’s Next Tragic Act – The Case for Federal Criminalization on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

This could happen to you: You have appeared in digital photographs. Your pictures aren’t sexually explicit or revealing — they just are pictures of your daily life: spending time with friends or your vacation selfies. Like millions of people, these images have likely made their way onto the Internet when you shared them on social media. But what if someone decides they don’t like you? With an app available on any smartphone, the digital images of your face can be easily clipped from the pictures you posted the Internet and pasted onto the body of a person engaged in sexually explicit acts. Without your knowledge or consent, you become the “star” of a realistic, pornographic “deepfake.”

This hypothetical reflects an emerging phenomenon in sex exploitation cybercrimes — it is the next tragic act in the unauthorized public dissemination of private sexually explicit photos or videos, known as “revenge porn.”

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Roberts on The Accused's Right to Accurate Procedures

Andrew J. Roberts (Melbourne Law School) has posted The Frailties of Human Memory and the Accused's Right to Accurate Procedures on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

The argument presented in this paper is that not only should the state make greater use of scientific research, it is under a moral and legal obligation to do so. The source of this obligation is the right to the most accurate procedures for determining innocence and guilt. I will suggest that this right is implied by the presumption of innocence.

Top-Ten Recent SSRN Downloads in Criminal Law eJournal

are here.  The usual disclaimers apply.

Rank	Paper	Downloads
1.	Mens Rea Reform and Its Discontents Benjamin Levin University of Colorado Law School Date Posted: 15 Jan 2019	197
2.	Consent and Coercion Kimberly Kessler Ferzan University of Virginia, School of Law Date Posted: 31 Jan 2019	151
3.	Criminalizing the Victim: Ending Prosecution of Human Trafficking Victims Jessica Aycock Texas Tech University School of Law Date Posted: 14 Feb 2019	127
4.	Making Federalism Great Again: How the Trump Administration's Attack on Sanctuary Cities Unintentionally Strengthened Judicial Protection for State Autonomy Ilya Somin George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School, Faculty Date Posted: 07 Mar 2019 [6th last week]	89
5.	Inheritance Forgery Reid K. Weisbord and David Horton Rutgers Law School and University of California, Davis - School of Law Date Posted: 08 Feb 2019 [4th last week]	85
6.	Mass Incarceration Paradigm Shift?: Convergence in an Age of Divergence Mugambi Jouet McGill Faculty of Law Date Posted: 22 Jan 2019 [5th last week]	71
7.	FOSTA: A Hostile Law with a Human Cost Lura Chamberlain Fordham University - Fordham Law Review Date Posted: 06 Feb 2019 [10th last week]	64
8.	Mitigations: The Forgotten Side of the Proportionality Principle Paul H. Robinson University of Pennsylvania Law School Date Posted: 01 Mar 2019 [new to top ten]	60
9.	Proportionality Theory in Punishment Philosophy: Fated for the Dustbin of Otiosity? Michael Tonry University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - School of Law Date Posted: 25 Feb 2019	57
10.	Criminal-Justice Apps Adam M. Gershowitz William & Mary Law School Date Posted: 24 Feb 2019 [new to top ten]	45

Top-Ten Recent SSRN Downloads in Criminal Procedure eJournal

are here.  The usual disclaimers apply.

Rank	Paper	Downloads
1.	Evaluating the Impacts of Eliminating Prosecutorial Requests for Cash Bail Aurelie Ouss and Megan T. Stevenson University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School, Faculty Date Posted: 25 Feb 2019	561
2.	Feigned Consensus: Usurping the Law in Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma Prosecutions Keith A. Findley, D. Michael Risinger, Patrick D. Barnes, MD, Julie Mack, David A. Moran, Barry Scheck and Thomas Bohan University of Wisconsin Law School, Seton Hall University School of Law, Stanford University - Pediatric Radiology and Neuroradiology, Pennsylvania State University - Penn State Hershey Medical Center, University of Michigan Law School, Professor of Law, Cardozo Law School, Co-Director, Innocence Project and American Academy of Forensic Sciences Date Posted: 05 Feb 2019	479
3.	Why Robert Mueller’s Appointment As Special Counsel Was Unlawful Steven G. Calabresi and Gary Lawson Northwestern University - Pritzker School of Law and Boston University School of Law Date Posted: 31 Jan 2019 [4th last week]	137
4.	Juvenile Life Without Parole in North Carolina Ben Finholt, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi and Kristen Renberg NC Prisoner Legal Services, Duke University School of Law, Duke University School of Law and Duke University School of Law Date Posted: 19 Feb 2019 [6th last week]	127
5.	Criminalizing the Victim: Ending Prosecution of Human Trafficking Victims Jessica Aycock Texas Tech University School of Law Date Posted: 14 Feb 2019	126
6.	Wealth, Equal Protection, and Due Process Brandon L. Garrett Duke University School of Law Date Posted: 19 Jan 2019 [7th last week]	123
7.	Is Police Behavior Getting Worse? The Importance of Data Selection in Evaluating the Police Aurelie Ouss and John Rappaport University of Pennsylvania and University of Chicago - Law School Date Posted: 31 Jan 2019 [9th last week]	108
8.	Beyond State v. Loomis: Artificial Intelligence, Government Algorithmization, and Accountability Han-Wei Liu, Ching-Fu Lin and Yu-Jie Chen Monash University, National Tsing Hua University and Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica Date Posted: 20 Jan 2019 [10th last week]	106
9.	An Empirical Study of Terrorism Charges and Terrorism Trials in Canada between September 2001 and September 2018 Michael Nesbitt University of Calgary, Faculty of Law Date Posted: 07 Feb 2019 [new to top ten]	101
10.	Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044 I. Bennett Capers Brooklyn Law School Date Posted: 11 Feb 2019 [new to top ten]	78

Moy on Police Technology and Racial Inequity

Laura Moy (Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law) has posted How Police Technology Aggravates Racial Inequity: A Taxonomy of Problems and a Path Forward on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

Over the past several years, increased awareness of racial inequity in policing, combined with increased scrutiny of police technologies, have sparked concerns that new technologies may aggravate racial inequity in policing. In order to evaluate whether or not they do so, however, the problem must be more clearly defined. Some scholars have explored racial inequity in depth as it relates to specific police technologies. But to date, none have provided an explanation of how police technology aggravates racial inequity that can be applied across all technologies.

This article fills that gap. It offers a proposed new taxonomy that parses police technology’s aggravation of racial inequity as five distinct problems: Police technology may (1) replicate inequity in policing, (2) mask inequity in policing, (3) transfer inequity from elsewhere to policing, (4) exacerbate inequitable policing harms, and/or (5) compromise oversight of inequity in policing.

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Denno on Neuroscience and the Personalization of Criminal Law

Deborah W. Denno (Fordham University School of Law) has posted Neuroscience and the Personalization of Criminal Law (University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 86, pp 359-401 (2019)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

While objective standards of reasonableness permeate most legal disciplines, criminal law has trended toward personalization since the 1960s, when the Model Penal Code introduced conceptions of mental states based on Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Today, advancements in neuroscience offer previously inconceivable insights into living brain structures and damage. This Essay contends that a criminal justice system that uses personalizing neuroscientific evidence will yield better outcomes. This Essay contributes two unique tools to the personalized law debate. First are the results of my two-decade-long Neuroscience Study, in which I have compiled eight hundred criminal cases that addressed neuroscientific evidence in any capacity. The data gathered from these cases suggest that simplistic views that regard neuroscience as either entirely exculpatory or solely indicative of future dangerousness are misinformed. Second, this Essay posits a probabilistic theory of analyzing evidence based on Bayes’s Theorem. Bayes’s Theorem offers a compelling model of human reasoning that comports with the process of assessing a defendant’s culpability in legal settings. Neuroscientific evidence can thus be understood as a means of modifying initial beliefs and mitigating implicit biases in criminal contexts. Employing these tools, I analyze the impact of personalized evidence on criminal defenses, which I argue are strongly motivated by probabilistic determinations of a defendant’s culpability. These determinations have significant impacts beyond individual cases and can contribute to trends in litigation funding. This Essay systematically argues that personalization, fueled by neuroscientific evidence, can provide gains in fairness and efficiency, especially when admitted in the context of criminal defenses, due to their emphasis on probabilistic determinations of culpability.