Settlements are often considered to be welfare-enhancing because they save time and litigation costs. In the presence of court error, however, this conclusion may be wrong. Court decisions create positive externalities for future litigants which will not occur if a dispute is settled out of...

We model the settlement of a legal dispute where the trial outcome depends on the behavior of a strategically motivated judge. We consider a standard asymmetric information model where the uninformed defendant makes a take it or leave it offer. If the case goes to trial, the judge decides how...

Apart from the loss of time and money, disputes between public authority and private partner in China's public-private partnership (PPP) projects are destroying the government's image of PPP support and the private partner's investment confidence. This article aims to explore the main causes for...

Some numbers in the political sphere seem to be chosen rather arbitrarily. One example might be the rule set out by the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court in 1995 that the overall tax load on assets must be limited to 50% of the yield on those assets. This rule was...

This article examines whether the judges of the French Constitutional Court demonstrated partisanship when ruling on the validity of the elections to the lower house of the French Parliament between 1958 and 2005. It uses a new dataset on the decisions of the Constitutional Court which takes...

Am 10. Juli 2012 verhandelte das Bundesverfassungsgericht über den ESM und den Fiskalpakt. Hans-Werner Sinn wurde von dem Gericht als Gutachter bei der Anhörung geladen. Dabei wurde dieser Text in gekürzter Form frei vorgetragen.

Dietrich Murswiek, Universität Freiburg, analysiert in seinem Kommentar die Maßnahmen zur »Euro-Rettung« unter verfassungsrechtlichen Gesichtspunkten.

Das Bundesverfassungsgericht hat im Februar 2014 seine Entscheidung zum Beschluss der Europäischen Zentralbank zum OMT-Programm vom September 2012 verkündet. Wie ist diese Entscheidung zu werten? Franz-Christoph Zeitler, Universität Augsburg und ehemals Deutsche Bundesbank, sieht in dem...

Die bis zum November 2006 regierende rot-rote Landesregierung in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern hatte eine umfassende innovative Verwaltungs- und Kreisstrukturreform in die Wege geleitet. Im Zuge der Verwaltungsreform sollten Aufgaben vom Land auf die kommunale Ebene verlagert werden und die...

More than one hundred years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court started to refer to social science evidence in its judgments. However, this has not resonated with many constitutional courts outside the United States, in particular in continental Europe. This contribution has a twofold aim. First, it...