When administrative agencies regulate, they are legally required to quantify the costs and benefits of their regulations. Yet most agencies struggle at this task. This is in part because a large number of regulations provide benefits that are not traded in markets and cannot be easily priced....

Academic departments decide on tenure standards with limited evidence about their accuracy and efficacy. We study the implications of stricter tenure standards in law schools, an environment in which 95 percent of all tenure track hires receive tenure. To do so, we construct a novel dataset of...

We investigate the role that political ideology plays in the selection process for articles in law reviews. To do so, we match data on the political ideology of student editors from 15 top law reviews from 1990 to 2005 to data on the political ideology of the authors of accepted articles. We...

Policies designed to increase the diversity of law review editors are being challenged in court. The lawsuits claim that, by "illegally us[ing] race and gender as criteria for selecting law students to staff their most elite academic journals," the law reviews have diminished the quality of the...

As scholars who write in intellectual property (“IP”), we write this letter with aspirations of reaching the highest ethical norms possible for our field. In particular, we have noted an influx of large contributions from corporate and private actors who have an economic stake in ongoing...

The ultimate end of patent law must be to spur innovations that improve human welfare — innovations that make people better off. But firms will only invest resources in developing patentable inventions that will allow them to make money — that is, inventions that people will want to use and...

Economists, legal scholars, and climate scientists have made a persuasive case that the international community stands to benefit greatly if the United States and China can be persuaded to participate in a global agreement on climate change. Scholars have thus focused on constructing regimes...

What are the costs and benefits of patent laws? While Congress and the courts are often able to evade this difficult question, there is one institutional actor that is not only well-advised but also required to consider costs and benefits: the Patent and Trademark Office, which — as an...