The last few decades have seen a dramatic shift in the admissibility of expert testimony in American courtrooms from a laissez-faire approach to a strict standard for admissibility, often called the Daubert test. The implicit rationale behind such a stringent standard for admissibility is the...

Minimum asset requirements are an increasingly common form of regulation intended to motivate better decision making by individuals who participate in potentially harmful activities. Shavell (2005) studied the optimality of this type of regulation within a framework in which an individual can...

We provide a model of endogenous plea bargaining in which a prosecutor has discretion over her choice of plea bargains in response to a level of exoneree compensation mandated by the state. It is shown that an increase of the compensation may invite a sentence-maximizing prosecutor to offer a...

We provide a simple framework in which the level of adversarial bias is endogenously determined in a litigation process. Using this model, we study the effect of using a court-appointed expert on the level of adversarial bias and the average error rates, and find an interesting trade-off:...

Concerned about evidence distortion arising from litigants' strong incentive to misrepresent information to fact-finders, legal scholars and commentators have long suggested that the court appoint its own advisor for a neutral piece of information about the dispute. This paper studies the...