The aim of this article is to compare strict liability and negligence rules on the basis of the incentives the provide to "appropriately" reduce accident losses. It will therefore be both convenient and clarifying to abstract from other issues in respect to which the rules could be evaluated. In...

This chapter presents a brief preview for this book Handbook of Law and Economics Volume 2 . The purpose of this book is to provide economists with a systematic introduction to and survey of research in the field of law and economics. The book contains 22 chapters and is organized into three...

This chapter presents a brief preview for this book Handbook of Law and Economics Volume 1 . The book provides economists with a systematic introduction and survey of research in the field of law and economics. The book contains 22 chapters and is organized into three main parts. Part I deals...

This chapter surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law—the use of governmental agents (regulators, inspectors, tax auditors, police, prosecutors) to detect and to sanction violators of legal rules. The theoretical core of the analysis addresses the following basic questions: Should...

This is a survey of legal liability for accidents. Three general aspects of accident liability are addressed. The first is the effect of liability on incentives, both whether to engage in activities (for instance, whether to drive) and how much care to exercise (at what speed to travel) to...

This is a survey of economic analysis of law, that is, of the emerging field under which the standard tools of microeconomics are employed to identify the effects of legal rules and their social desirability. Five basic subject areas are covered. The first is legal liability for harm. Here we...

This article studies how liability for environmentally harmful discharges affects the incentives of firms to engage in cleanup and invest in precautions, as well as the incentives of consumers to purchase the goods whose production leads to discharges. Our main conclusion is that making firms...

In Fairness versus Welfare, we advance the thesis that social policies should be assessed based entirely on their effects on individuals' well-being. This thesis implies that no independent weight should be accorded to notions of fairness (other than many purely distributive notions). We support...

Should property rights be protected absolutely -- by property rules -- or instead by the requirement that infringing parties pay for harm done--that is, by liability rules? In this article, we present a systematic economic analysis of this fundamental question. Our primary object is to explain...

A fundamental legal problem is whether property rights should be protected by property rules or by liability rules. In this Article, we provide a systematic economic analysis of the choice between property and liability rules. We answer a basic question: why is it that liability rules are...