Parties often exchange promises of future performance with one another. Legal systems frame and regulate contracts involving the exchange of bilateral promises of future performance differently from one another. Two conceptual and practical questions often arise in these bilateral situations....

In a recent article, Gersen and Posner (2007) examined the role of timing rules in promoting the optimal timing of legislative action. In this brief essay, we address the issue of optimal timing of lawmaking through the lens of option theory. We provide a formalization of seven alternative...

In this paper we analyze the factors that should be considered when allocating a given policy function at a particular level of government and how these factors affect the growth and evolution of multi-level governments. After discussing the interplay of economies of scale, economies of scope,...

In this paper we analyze the factors that should be considered when allocating a given policy function at a particular level of government and how these factors affect the growth and evolution of multi-level governments. After discussing the interplay of economies of scale, economies of scope,...

In this paper, we illustrate how different behavioral problems can be incorporated into the standard economic model of tort law. Through this exercise, we develop a modeling language that can be utilized by law and economic scholars when considering the effect of behavioral biases and cognitive...

In this paper, we develop an economic model of subsidiarity and discuss the ways in which this instrument should best be applied in the context of a changing European Union. The results suggest that the application of the subsidiarity test in the context of a union with growing membership...

This paper is about the incentive effects of legal presumptions. We analyze three interrelated effects of legal presumptions in a tort setting: (1) incentives to invest in evidence technology; (2) incentives to invest in care-type precautions; and (3) incentives to mitigate excessive activity...

In negligence regimes, tort plaintiffs traditionally bear the burden of proving the negligence of their defendants. Several European legal systems adopted rules that have reversed this traditional evidentiary rule in certain categories of torts, creating a rebuttable presumption of negligence...

In a dispute involving multifarious points of disagreement, courts have the discretion to adjudicate issues separately in multiple, sequential proceedings or all-at-once in a single unitary proceeding. In this paper, we contrast the effects of sequential and unitary trials on parties' decisions...

In the field of comparative law, the use of economic analysis has been at the same time fashionable and controversial. Notwithstanding its controversial acceptance in the discipline, the so-called comparative law and economics method is an important example of the application of economics to...