Expanded academic and caselaw resorces from the Plea Bargaining Institute

In this post a couple of years ago, I noted the launch of the Plea Bargaining Institute (PBI) which aspired to "provide a global intellectual home for academics, policymakers, advocacy organizations and practitioners working in the plea bargaining space."   One can check out the News tab on the PBI website to see some of the Institute's  activities, and this latest item from earlier this week particularly caught my attention under the heading "PBI Expands Online Summaries Database to Incorporate Academic Articles."  Here is an excerpt:

The Plea Bargaining Institute has expanded the online summaries database to include over 130 academic articles.  The articles represent important works from 1979 through 2023 in the fields of law, psychology, economics and other disciplines that assist in better understanding the history, growth, and operation of plea bargaining.

“The Institute’s mission includes creating better access to research for practitioners, policy makers, and academics in diverse fields of study,” said PBI Founding Director Lucian Dervan.  “This new collection of online academic summaries will assist each of these groups in accessing and examining important research that will better inform their litigation, policy initiatives, and cross-disciplinary research.”

Each of the academic entries in the database contains the title, authors, source, and publication year of the article. This is followed by a list of terms relevant to the research piece, and these terms can be used to identify other research in the database relevant to the same subject matter.  Finally, each summary contains a detailed description of the research’s main findings and conclusions and a key quote from the piece.

These new academic article entries supplement the fifty-nine Supreme Court summaries representing significant Supreme Court decisions regarding plea bargaining since 1970 already included in the online database.  A report regarding those 59 Supreme Court decisions was released earlier this year by the Institute.  A report regarding the academic articles will be released in the near future.