In response to claims that the threat of environmental liability under the Superfund law deters the acquisition of potentially contaminated sites (or brownfields) for redevelopment, the federal government has adopted programs to protect purchasers from liability. This protection may be...

This paper shows that, when plaintiffs cannot predict the outcome of litigation with certainty, neither the American rule of litigation cost allocation (under which each litigant bears its own expenses) nor the British rule (under which the losing litigant pays the attorneys' fees of the winning...

This paper presents a model of cumulative innovation to investigate what factors should influence a court's decision when a patentee alleges that another inventor has infringed the patent with an improved version of the patented product. The model reveals how the optimal patent policy would...

This paper addresses the role of trade restrictions in support of policies to protect the global environment and proposes a more liberal treatment of these environmental trade measures (ETMs) than that adopted by dispute- settlement panels of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)....

In response to claims that the threat of environmental liability under the Superfund law deters the acquisition of potentially contaminated sites (or "brownfields") for redevelopment, the federal government has adopted programs to protect purchasers from liability. This protection may be...

Economic theory developed in the prior literature indicates that under the joint and several liability imposed by the federal Superfund statute, the government should recover more of its costs of cleaning up contaminated sites than it would under nonjoint liability, and the amount recovered...

Under most federal environmental laws and some health and safety laws, states may apply for “primacy,” that is, authority to implement and enforce federal law, through a process known as “authorization.” Some observers fear that states use authorization to adopt more lax policies in a...

Public policies for pollution control, including climate change policies, sometimes allow polluters in one sector subject to an emissions cap to offset excessive emissions with pollution abatement in another sector. The government may find it more costly to verify offset claims than to verify...

Public policies for pollution control, including climate change policies, sometimes allow polluters in one sector subject to an emissions cap to offset excessive emissions in that sector with pollution abatement in another sector. The government may often find it more costly to verify offset...