We build towards a prediction of the content of the world's constitutions, conditional upon the absence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The paper, at this juncture, is one-part research design, and one-part evidence. The theory guiding the background causal mechanism is...

In recent decades, there has been a wide-ranging global movement towards constitutional review. This development poses important puzzles of political economy: Why would self-interested governments willingly constrain themselves by constitutional means? What explains the global shift towards...

It is a commonplace that we live in an era of increasing international interdependence, in which there has been a proliferation of international law and international organizations. Yet our understanding of the workings of international law has not kept pace. While we have a good deal of work on...

The problem of odious debt typically arises when a despotic regime has incurred substantial sovereign debt and is then succeeded by a less-despotic, possibly democratic, regime that seeks to repudiate that debt. There is no agreed-upon method for dealing with attempts to repudiate odious debt....

This paper concerns the increasing use of international commitment devices by developing countries. These devices include bilateral investment treaties, international arbitration, and multilateral trade commitments. The conventional wisdom is that such devices help to remedy local institutional...

Notable scholars have considered the conditions under which rules of customary law can emerge spontaneously through the voluntary interaction and exchange of states in the international community. In this paper, we model the process of international customary law formation under different...

Customary international law is one of the three main sources of international law; lamentably, it has historically received little attention from law and economics scholars, despite providing rich material for economic analysis. In this chapter, we provide a concise overview of recent research...