Courts seeking the most likely intent of contracting parties should interpret contracts according to Bayes’ Rule. The best interpretation of a contract reflects both the prior likelihood (base rate) of a pair of contracting parties having a given intention as well as the probability that the...

Existing research suggests that practicing litigators are too confident in the merits of their clients’ cases. But practicing attorneys often self select (1) the area of law in which they practice, (2) the side on which to practice within that area, (3) law firms with whom they practice, and...

The limited capacity of lawmakers to intuit the unstated wishes of contracting parties constitutes a daunting obstacle to the formulation of majoritarian default rules. This paper presents a field experiment that prices consumers’ unstated understandings of contractual silence regarding...