This Essay surveys recent developments across the fields of finance and innovation to highlight some common themes concerning the importance of property rights to economic success. Society regularly makes choices when shaping the precise contours of the legal institutions that govern the...

Bayesian empirical approaches appear frequently in fields such as engineering, computer science, political science and medicine, but almost never in law. This article illustrates how such approaches might be very useful in empirical legal studies. In particular, Bayesian approaches enable a much...

There are two basic approaches to deterring socially harmful behavior: with the threat of litigation by private parties or with enforcement by public agencies. Both approaches are used in most countries, but in varying degrees. Private litigation is common in the United States and (to a lesser...

Although central to understanding the role of the media, few quantitative measures of the political positions of media exist. Collecting and classifying editorials adopted by 23 major U.S. newspapers on 495 Supreme Court cases from 1994-2004, we apply an item response theoretic approach to place...

Any rule-based system has to include a mechanism for the enforcement of its rules and a means for settlement of disputes about alleged violation of rules. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), concluded in 1947 and its successor the World Trade Organization (WTO) that subsumed it in...

This paper reviews China's recent efforts to enact a competition policy (antitrust) law. We focus on three issues: (1) What is the substance of the proposed law, and how does it differ from existing antitrust law in other countries, (2) How will the law be implemented or enforced, and how will...

This article is part of a symposium in honor of William Klein on the subject of a functional typology of corporation law. Any typology must be animated by an underlying theory whose terms dictate the lines the typology draws. Here the focus is on the level of the theory that might animate the...

This paper presents an institution - the Community Responsibility System (CRS) - which has been a missing link in our understanding of market development. The CRS fostered market expansion throughout pre-modern Europe by providing the contract enforcement required for impersonal exchange...

The fact of a small number of hostile takeover bids in Japan the recent past, together with technical amendments of the Civil Code that would allow a poison pill-like security, raises the question of how a poison pill would operate in Japan should it be widely deployed. This paper reviews the...

High frequency trading has led to widespread eft orts to reduce information propagation delays between physically distant exchanges. Using relativistically correct millisecond-resolution tick data, we document a 3-millisecond decrease in one-way communication time between the Chicago and New...