The U.S. faces a mounting crisis in access to justice. Vast numbers of ordinary Americans represent themselves in routine legal matters daily in our over-burdened courts. Obtaining ex ante legal advice is effectively impossible for almost everyone except larger corporate entities, organizations...

If trials have been vanishing from the federal courts in the past few decades, it matters, from a normative perspective, whether this trend reflects an increase in private settlements (as many assume) or an increase in public non-trial adjudication. In this paper I investigate the coding of...

If trials have been "vanishing" from the federal courts in the past few decades, it matters, from a normative perspective, whether this trend reflects an increase in private settlements (as many assume) or an increase in public non-trial adjudication. In this paper I investigate the coding of...

Recent efforts to assess whether or not the trial is vanishing from the civil justice system, have thus far not drawn distinctions between cases in which the market efficiency function of the legal system is in play and those in which democratic and political functions are in play. As Marc...

Law in modern market societies serves both democratic and economic functions. In its economic function, law is a service, a means of enhancing the value of transactions and organizations. Yet modern market economies continue to rely on the state, rather than the market, to provide this service....

In the past decade a comparative law and economics literature has emerged that is largely organized around an effort to explain differences in country economic performance in terms of differences between common law and civil code systems. Assumptions about differences between common law and...

The new comparative economics is largely organized around an effort to explain differences in country economic performance in terms of differences between common law and civil code systems. Assumptions about differences between common law and civil code regimes and the correspondence between...

Law in modern market societies serves both democratic and economic functions. In its economic function, law is a service, a means of enhancing the value of transactions and organizations. Yet modern market economies continue to rely on the state, rather than the market, to provide this service....

Why do successful constitutions have the attributes characteristically associated with the rule of law? Why do constitutions involve public reasoning? And, how is such a system sustained as an equilibrium? In this paper, we adapt the framework in our previous work on “what is law?” to the...

Although most economic and positive political theory presumes the existence of an effective legal regime (protecting property rights or implementing legislative or judicial choices, for example), behavioral social science has devoted little systematic attention to the question of what...