Judicial venality, i.e., the sales of public positions in the judicial sector, was used extensively in France and in Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Offices were bought because judges received trial fees from litigants. Kings sold them because they needed money, at the cost of losing...

We provide an alternative explanation of French legal centralization. To do this we develop a rational choice model of the legal architecture around 1789 and the French Revolution. Following Tocqueville we propose to analyze the French movement towards legal centralization as the result of an...

The literature on legal traditions focuses on the comparative macroeconomic effects of legal systems concentrating on efficiency alone and leaving distributive issues to taxation. However, the legal structure of a country also conditions the primary distribution of income and can have a...

We develop a New Keynesian Phillips curve based on a combination of staggered price contracts and indexation to past inflation. This Phillips curve links current inflation dynamics to past inflation with a positive weight, as well as current and lagged expectations of inflation and output,...

We analyze the conflicts between French kings and the office-holders who were members of the venal French Parliaments throughout the 18th century using an implicit contract approach in which Parliamentarians protect their rents, the king pays a financial bonus to office holders and obtains their...

We study the market for AI systems that are used to help to diagnose and treat diseases, reducing the risk of medical error. Based on a two-firm vertical product differentiation model, we examine how, in the event of patient harm, the amount of the compensation payment, and the division of this...

For contemporary legal theory, law is essentially an interpretative and hermeneutic practice (Ackerman (1991), Horwitz (1992)). A straightforward consequence is that legal disputes between parties are motivated by their divergent interpretations regarding what law says on their case. This point...

This paper elaborates on a basic model of mass tort litigation, highlighting the existence of positive informational externalities afforded by the discovery process (as a general technology of production of evidences) in order to study when a class action is formed, or when a sequence of...

When several plaintiffs file individually a lawsuit against the same tortfeasor, the resolution of the various cases through repeated trials produces positive informational externalities, which benefit to the later plaintiffs (since there exist precedents, jurisprudence.). Thus, the first filers...