We develop a 2-country model of legal dynamics in which each country's social welfare depends generally on its actual law, its culturally ideal one, its technologically efficient one and the actual law of the other country. In our model, countries are better off when all these laws coincide....

In an environment where the optimal level of care is unknown, we ask, under a state-of-the-art defense, which method is better able to induce parties to undertake optimal care. Assuming courts can see a noisy signal of research activities undertaken by a defendant and by some of its competitors,...