Economists often presume that the costs of drafting contracts are directly related to the ‘completeness' of the contracts in question. This may be a reasonable presumption when contractual documents are drafted from scratch. But anyone who has drafted a contract knows that it is typically much...

The use of indicators is a prominent feature of contemporary global governance. Indicators are produced by organizations ranging from public actors such as the World Bank or the US State Department, to NGOs such as Freedom House, to hybrid entities such as the Global Fund, to private sector...

What role should for-profit organizations play in governing commercial transactions? Recent scholarship on the privatization of commercial law has advocated expanding the role of for-profits. This essay tests the merits of that proposal in a context where the case for relying on for-profits seem...

We examine factors that might explain how sanctions imposed in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement actions vary across the firms and countries implicated using a dataset of FCPA actions resolved from 2004 to 2011. We find evidence that the sanctions in an individual FCPA action are...

Canadian courts have shown an interest in abandoning the common law’s traditional rule against enforcing penalty clauses and instead analyzing those clauses through the lens of the doctrine of unconscionability. The Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision in Birch v. Union of Taxation Employees,...

Access to financial capital is an important determinant of the prospects for development of poor countries. This short essay makes the case for treating the legal aspects of financing development as an important field of study. It begins by describing the kinds of transactions that might be of...