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,...

Loser-pays-all rules are frequently used by modern legal systems to compensate the party who prevails in a civil case for the legal fees and costs incurred during a civil trial. Loser-pays-all rules are not used in criminal cases. Public prosecution bears the cost of its prosecutorial efforts...

In the past couple of decades, scholars have predominantly employed rent-seeking models to analyze litigation problems. In this paper, we build on the existing literature to show how alternative fee-shifting arrangements (i.e., the American rule and modified English rule) affect parties'...

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...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

Customary international law is one of the three main sources of international law; lamentably, it has historically received little attention from law and economics scholars, despite providing rich material for economic analysis. In this chapter, we provide a concise overview of recent research...

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...

Taxation is one of the few things that we can take as a given in life. People will always look for ways to minimize the tax burdens that governments seek to impose on them. Indeed, there is a very well-developed industry devoted to that end. How should governments proceed? We develop an economic...