Minimum asset and liability insurance requirements must often be met in order for parties to participate in potentially harmful activities. Such financial responsibility requirements may improve parties' decisions whether to engage in harmful activities and, if so, their efforts to reduce risk....

This article studies a model of liability for automobile accidents in the coming world in which automobiles will be autonomous. In that world, travelers will not be drivers, rendering liability premised on driver fault irrelevant as a means of reducing accident dangers. Moreover, no other...

The prison time actually served by a convicted criminal depends to a significant degree on decisions made by the state during the course of imprisonment—on whether to grant parole or other forms of sentence reduction. In this article we study a model of the adjustment of sentences assuming...

Discretion is examined as a feature of the design of rule-guided systems. That is, given that rules have to be administered by some group of persons, called adjudicators, and given that their goals may be different from society's (or a relevant organization's), when is it socially desirable to...

The major theme of this article is that the interpretation of contracts is in the interests of contracting parties. The general reasons are (a) that interpretation may improve on otherwise imperfect contracts; and (b) that the prospect of interpretation allows parties to write simpler contracts...

The prison time actually served by a convicted criminal depends to a significant degree on decisions made by the state during the course of imprisonment--on whether to grant parole or other forms of sentence reduction. In this article we study a model of the adjustment of sentences assuming that...

Overly strict legal standards are commonly thought to discourage parties from engaging in socially desirable activities. It is explained here, however, that excessive legal standards cannot lead to undesirable curtailment of activities when legal standards are enforced by liability for...