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A simple nonlocal plasticity model is proposed to account for the size dependence of plastic deformation at the micro-scale and at the same time to regularize the response in the presence of localization phenomena. Nonlocality is introduced in the yield function through the definition of a nonlocal strain, which is the weighted average of the local strain over a suitable neighborhood, depending on the material length. We apply the model to a strain localization problem of a softening bar and we compare model predictions with experiments on microbending and microtorsion.