Judges are obliged to give reasons for their decisions. A set of formal and informal norms specifies how this is to be done. These norms serve a whole array of purposes. This paper shows that one substantial effect is on decision quality. The effect can even be demonstrated on an ad hoc basis....

The law is not a bunch of scattered rules, it is a body. This simple statement suffices to demonstrate that consistency is crucial for the law. Esteemed philosophers radicalise the statement: If it stops being consistent, to them the law is no longer the law. Consequently, consistency must be an...

Die Juristen haben eine gespaltene Beziehung zu Treu und Glauben. Es soll gerecht zugehen. Deshalb sollen treuwidrige Entscheidungen vermieden werden. Aber für den offenen Rückgriff auf normative Wertungen haben Juristen keine spezifische professionelle Kompetenz. Dieser Beitrag macht aus der...

The Eroding Trust in Capitalism and its Consequences for Law: On both sides of the Atlantic, legislators consider a cap on manager income. As a redistributive intervention, the cap would be misplaced. It affects such a small number of persons that the effect on the Gini coefficient would be...

Throughout history, people have suffered for the sake of their religion. Religious organisations have been forbidden or governments have tightly controlled them. The constitutional protection of freedom of religion is a necessity. In a religiously pluralistic world, granting the guarantee is...

Sanctions are often so weak that a money maximizing individual would not be deterred. In this paper I show that they may nonetheless serve a forward looking purpose if sufficiently many individuals are averse against advantageous inequity. Using the Fehr/Schmidt model (QJE 1999) I define three...

If accurate prediction is the goal, and if information about the unconditional probability of the predicted event is available, a strong case can be made for using this information, i.e. for a Bayesian approach to inference. Not so rarely, the law calls for accurate prediction, e.g. if a bailing...

Originally, behavioral law and economics was an exercise in exploring the implications of key findings from behavioral economics (and psychology) for the analysis and reform of legal institutions. Yet as the new discipline matures, it increasingly replaces foreign evidence by fresh evidence,...

The European Commission is working on a revision of its Guidelines on Research and Development Agreements. On this occasion, this note surveys the existing experimental evidence. Experiments add a number of additional arguments to the normative assessment. R&D agreements have a much smaller...

The novel part of this paper is a model of the principle of proportionality, as the cornerstone of the doctrine of fundamental rights. German law, and with some modifications also the law of the European Community and the European Convention on Human Rights, do not categorically outlaw...