Associate Professor of Law Lucian Dervan recently received the Excellence in Scholarship award at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in New Orleans. The award was given by the East Asian Law & Society Section of the AALS. The piece for which the award was given was his new co-authored article titled “Bargained Justice: A Comparative Analysis of Plea Bargaining.” The article discusses the results of ongoing comparative research in the United States, Japan and South Korea. The research, undertaken with the assistance of a grant from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, seeks to better understand the prevalence of false pleas of guilty globally and the impact of factors such as incentives, pretrial detention and risk aversion on defendant decision-making. Dervan said, “We hope that our work will bring further attention to the phenomenon on false pleas and assist in creating more accurate and reliable systems of criminal justice throughout the world.”
