In tort litigation, delayed settlement or impasse imposes high costs on the parties and society. Litigation institutions might influence social welfare by affecting the likelihood of out-of-court settlement and the potential injurers' investment in product safety. An appropriate design of...

Structured Investment Vehicles or SIVs are highly complex derivative-related vehicles and products, typically involving offshore “bankruptcy-remote” special purpose companies and trusts, complex rules for the management of portfolios of derivative assets and additional rules for the...

Vertical restraints, such as vertical integration, exclusive dealing contracts, and tying and bundling practices, have been subject of lively policy and academic discussions. Scholars associated with the Chicago School challenged early foreclosure doctrines by arguing that vertical restraints...

Parties often exchange promises of future performance with one another. Legal systems frame and regulate contracts involving the exchange of bilateral promises of future performance differently from one another. Two conceptual and practical questions often arise in these bilateral situations....

This paper deals with the risk of opportunism – the usual risk in economic exchanges. The breach of contract is probably the most common event in daily life and has therefore attracted research and debates in many disciplines of the social sciences. Our discussion deals with the current...

With its focus on private legal systems, the private ordering literature sets up a seeming dichotomy between public court adjudication of disputes, applying publicly created laws, and private arbitral adjudication of disputes, applying privately developed rules. Trade association arbitrations...

Critics of pro-tenant residential laws have argued that such laws actually hurt tenants. Law-and-economics scholars, for instance, argue that such reforms raise the cost of doing business to landlords. Forced to bring their dwellings up to code and wary of costly tenant lawsuits, landlords...

In recent years, scholars have given much attention to the problem of charitable trust enforcement. Departing from the common law, section 405(c) of the Uniform Trust Code provides that “[t]he settlor of a charitable trust, among others, may maintain a proceeding to enforce the trust.” This...

The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in MedImmune v. Genentech reversed prior case law and allowed a licensee in good standing to challenge the validity of the licensed patent. In some ways, the decision was unsurprising. It made patent law more consistent with general rules on justiciability and...