Punishments for norm violations are hypothesised to be a crucial component of the maintenance of cooperation in humans but are rarely studied from a comparative perspective. We investigated the degree to which punishment systems were correlated with socioecology and cultural history. We took data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database and coded ethnographic documents from a sample of 131 largely non-industrial societies. We recorded whether punishment for norm violations concerned adultery, religion, food, rape or war cowardice and whether sanctions were reputational, physical, material or execution. We used Bayesian phylogenetic regression modelling to test for culture-level covariation. We found little evidence of phylogenetic signals in evidence for punishment types, suggesting that punishment systems change relatively quickly over cultural evolutionary history. We found evidence that reputational punishment was associated with egalitarianism and the absence of food storage; material punishment was associated with the presence of food storage; physical punishment was moderately associated with greater dependence on hunting; and execution punishment was moderately associated with social stratification. Taken together, our results suggest that the role and kind of punishment vary both by the severity of the norm violation, but also by the specific socio-economic system of the society.

It is widely agreed that there is a crisis in labour/employment standards enforcement. A key issue is the role of deterrence measures that penalise violations. Employment standards enforcement in Ontario, like in most jurisdictions, is based mainly on a compliance framework promoting voluntary resolution of complaints and, if that fails, ordering restitution. Deterrence measures that penalise violations are rarely invoked. However, the Ontario government has recently increased the role of proactive inspections and tickets, a low-level deterrence measure which imposes fines of CAD295 plus victim surcharges. In examining the effectiveness of the use of tickets in inspections, we begin by looking at this development in the broader context of employment standards enforcement and its historical trajectory. Then, using administrative data from the Ministry of Labour, we examine when and why tickets are issued in the course of workplace inspections. After demonstrating that even when ticketable violations are detected, tickets are issued only rarely, we explore factors associated with an increased likelihood of an inspector issuing a ticket. Finally, we consider how the overall deterrent effect of workplace inspections is influenced by the use or non-use of deterrence tools.

The relative performance of public and private enterprises has been long debated. We construct a comprehensive violation dataset based on the EPA's Safe Drinking Water Information System to empirically investigate the compliance behavior of publicly and privately owned Public Water Systems (PWSs). Our results show that publicly owned PWSs commit significantly more Maximum Contamination Level, Treatment Technique, and Health-Related violations but fewer Monitor and Reporting violations than privately owned PWSs. We also find that municipal-level heterogeneities explain a substantial amount of variation in violation behaviors among PWSs, suggesting water supply quality depends crucially on location-specific regulations and local economic conditions.

Some states, the United States in particular, have allowed their courts to exercise universal tort jurisdiction over gross human rights violations, i.e., to hear complaints for damages by victims of such violations committed abroad. It is argued that, from a policy perspective, universal tort jurisdiction has some distinctive advantages over universal criminal jurisdiction; in particular, it may take victims more seriously. On the downside, it may possibly serve the function of morally condemning gross human rights violations less well.

From a legal perspective, concerns have been raised over the legality of exercising universal tort jurisdiction under international law. It is submitted nevertheless that the fact that only a limited number of states allow the exercise of universal tort jurisdiction is not fatal to the lawfulness of such jurisdiction under international law. These states may not provide for universal tort jurisdiction because they prefer criminal justice solutions, rather than because they consider such jurisdiction to be internationally unlawful. There is, in addition, no evidence of substantial international protest against assertions of universal tort jurisdiction. As a result, there is as of yet insufficient evidence of a customary international law norm outlawing universal tort jurisdiction having crystallized.

This paper introduces a general procedure that tests the significance of the departures from utility maximization, departures defined as violations of the general axiom of revealed preference (GARP). This general procedure is based on (i) an adjustment procedure that computes the minimal perturbation in order to satisfy GARP by using the information content in the transitive closure matrix and (ii) a test procedure that checks the significance of the necessary adjustment. This procedure can be easily implemented and programmed, and we run Monte Carlo simulations to show that it is quite powerful.