Many countries strive to provide independence to their judges and improve judicial quality through incorporating formal protection clauses in their constitution. This constitutional protection, I argue, has not been effective. Using a comprehensive set of indicators of constitutional protection,...

Contract enforcement does not only affect single transactions but the market as a whole. We compare alternative institutions that allocate enforcement rights to the different parties to a credit transaction: either lenders, borrowers, or judges. Despite all parties having incentives to enforce...

Who gets to determine rights and justice? Which mechanism of judicial selection and accountability is optimal? There is no easy answer. If judges are independent experts, nominated and evaluated by their peers, they will be immune from the pressures of electoral rent-seeking, but unaccountable...

We develop a model of individual prosecutors (and teams of prosecutors) to address the incentives for the suppression of exculpatory evidence. Our model assumes that each individual prosecutor trades off a desire for career advancement (by winning a case) and a disutility for knowingly...

Judicial torture to extract information or elicit confession was a common practice in pre-modern societies, both in the East and the West. Moreover, often it was applied not only on the suspects, but also on the witnesses and plaintiffs as well. This paper proposes a positive theory for judicial...

The present paper urges the reader to overcome these barriers to scholarly appreciation, to cast to the side any preliminary skepticism toward election-by-lot as a reasonable allocation mechanism, and to take seriously for the moment, the claim that election-by-lot might be usefully employed in...

Multi-party litigation refers to different legal mechanisms that facilitate groups of litigants with similar causes of action to bring consolidated legal claims to court. The rise of collective action regimes around the world reflects a trend in civil litigation which offers an alternative to...

This paper examines the law and economics of third-party financed litigation. I explore the conditions under which a system of third-party financiers and litigators can enhance social welfare, and the conditions under which it is likely to reduce social welfare. Among the applications I consider...