In 1927 the mathematician Frank Ramsey published a paper on optimal taxation in which he put forward what has come to be known as the “Ramsey rule”. Nearly one hundred years later, Ramsey’s paper remains a go-to reference for normative tax theory in a number of fields, including legal...

In an influential paper Polinsky and Che (1991) propose that litigation can be made a more cost effective tool for setting primary activity incentives (e.g., for product safety or promissory performance) by reducing plaintiffs' recovery while simultaneously raising defendants' damages....

I study the basic evidentiary problem of how the legal system regulates primary activities on the basis of information supplied by interested and potentially dishonest parties. I then apply the framework to the historical evolution of Civil Procedure. Evidence production is analyzed according to...

The conventional economic model of enforcement focuses on the cost and effect of the state’s efforts to detect violations. This survey considers attempts to add to this framework the cost and effect of violators’ efforts to avoid detection. The survey describes how the conventional model...

Two agents with different priors watch a sequence unfold over time, updating their priors about the future course of the sequence with each new observation. Blackwell and Dubins (1962) show that the agentsi opinions about the future will converge if their priors over the sequence space are...

This document contains four appendices to Sanchirico, Chris William, Progressivity and Potential Income: Measuring the Effect of Changing Work Patterns on Income Tax Progressivity. Columbia Law Review, Vol. 108, Pg. 1551, 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=961310 These are: 1. The...

Many firms conduct 'environmental audits' to test compliance with a complex array of environmental regulations. Commentators suggest, however, that self-auditing is not as common as it should be, because firms fear that what they find will be used against them. This article analyzes...

Almost all Law and Economic analysis evaluates legal rules solely on the basis of the efficiency criterion with no consideration of distributive justice. Recently, the rationale for this long standing practice has been called into question by scholars within the Law and Economics community. In...

Environmental self-auditing by private firms is generally thought to both deserve and require encouragement. Firms can audit themselves more cheaply and effectively than can regulators, but too often are deterred for fear that the information they uncover will be used against them. To reduce...