We develop a 2-country model of legal dynamics in which each country's social welfare depends generally on its actual law, its culturally ideal one, its technologically efficient one and the actual law of the other country. In our model, countries are better off when all these laws coincide....

In common law legal systems, there is no legal duty to rescue persons in danger. By contrast in code-based legal systems, the principle of duty to rescue does apply. What is behind this difference? To answer this question, we develop a new model extending the reach and strength of the standard...

In an environment where the optimal level of care is unknown, we ask, under a state-of-the-art defense, which method is better able to induce parties to undertake optimal care. Assuming courts can see a noisy signal of research activities undertaken by a defendant and by some of its competitors,...