Individuals may repeatedly face a choice of whether to obey a legal rule. Conventional legal scholarship has long assumed that whether such a choice is made repeatedly or is a one-time event has little or no effect on individuals’ decisions. Following models of rational-choice theory,...

Harsh sanctions are conventionally assumed to primarily benefit vulnerable targets. Contrary to this perception, this article shows that augmented sanctions often serve the less vulnerable targets. While decreasing crime, harsher sanctions also induce the police to shift enforcement efforts from...

Under the conventional tort law paradigm, a tortfeasor behaves unreasonably when two conditions are met: the tortfeasor could have averted the harm by investing in cost-effective precautions and failed to do so, and other, more cost-effective precautions were not available to the victim. Torts...

This paper provides an economic justification for the exemption from liability for omissions and for the exceptions to this exemption. It interprets the differential treatment of acts and omissions in tort law as a proxy for a more fundamental distinction between harms caused by multiple...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of shaming penalties. It establishes that there may be an inverse relation between the rate of shaming penalties and their deterrent effects - the more people are shamed the less deterring shaming penalties become. This conclusion is based on a search...

Predictability in civil and criminal sanctions is generally understood as desirable. Conversely, unpredictability is condemned as a violation of the rule of law. This paper explores predictability in sanctioning from the point of view of efficiency. It is argued that, given a constant expected...

This paper defends judicial review on the grounds that judicial review is necessary for protecting “a right to a hearing.” Judicial review is praised by its advocates on the basis of instrumentalist reasons, i.e., because of its desirable contingent consequences such as protecting rights,...

Standard theory assumes that voters' preferences over actions (voting) are induced by their preferences over electoral outcomes (policies, candidates). But voters may also have non-consequentialist (NC) motivations: they may care about how they vote even if it does not a¤ect the outcome. When...

The traditional premise of criminal law is that criminals who are convicted of similar crimes under similar circumstances ought to be subject to identical sentences. This article provides an efficiency-based rationale for discriminatory sentencing, i.e., establishes circumstances under which...