We examine 70,581 felony court cases filed in Chicago, IL during the period 1990-2007. We exploit case randomization to assess the impact of judge assignment and sentencing decisions on the arrival rates of new charges. Relative to prior research, we document an important source of heterogeneity...

What is ethics and how is it related to the legal system and to economics? Are there ethical values in Jewish Law, and could it be that we find in the writing of Hazal [the sages] an interest in job turnover? The purpose of this paper is to answer to those questions by focusing on a specific...

In the media, the so-called cum/ex trades were addressed as the biggest tax robbery in history. In a few years, the financial trading scheme caused an estimated damage to European state treasuries of ca. 50 billion euros. Through highly complex transactions, a network of equity traders, banks,...

Summer of 2020 represented a potentially pivotal moment in the movements against mass incarceration and for racial justice. The authors commenced a study of Baltimore’s pretrial legal system just as the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and urgent cries of Black Lives Matter appeared to...

The article deals with the issue of EC Directive 1937/2019 to promote the protection of EU interests, the so-called Whistleblower Protection Directive. Under this directive anyone who becomes aware of a threat or violation of law, has the possibility to report the conduct. The text of the...

The digital transformation "revolutionizes" entire economies and societies. It can be interpreted as a Schumpeterian technological and economic revolution that fits well into his "Theory of Economic Development" written more than 100 years ago. This paper analyzes three current policy debates...

The essay deals with the features of, and the challenges posed by the initiatives aiming to harmonize European private laws. The first part focuses on the comparison of (overt) methods and (hidden) implications pursued by research-oriented enterprises – such as ‘The Common Core Project’ or...

The movement toward inclusivity in global soft law making is set out against a backdrop of historically uneven representation in global institutions. An innovative effort to advance participation in soft law development began in 2012 with the establishment of the United Nations Commission on...

Appellate courts sometimes issue inconsistent decisions. Individual judges are sometimes inconsistent too. We argue that making judges more consistent could exacerbate the problem of inconsistent courts. We do so through a variant of Arrow's model of preference aggregation in which preferences...

Much political conflict in the world revolves around the issue of how much freedom to accord people. Liberal democracies are characterized by, e.g., the rule of law and a strong protection of civil rights, giving individuals a great deal of legally guaranteed freedom to lead their lives as they...

The phenomenon of Big Data intersects with comparative law and justice in several noteworthy profiles.First, the comparative approach leads to identifying the peculiar characteristics of the data through a conceptual framework of the same in the perspective of other disciplines, in particular...

Tackling corruption regularly appears on the agendas of almost all governments. Anti-corruption public policies aim to prevent corrupt behaviour both at the highest levels of government and in everyday social life. On the one hand, corruption seriously undermines the democratic principles of the...

In many countries, the operation of legal, political and regulatory institutions is subverted by the wealthy and the politically powerful for their own benefit. This subversion takes the form of corruption, intimidation, and other forms of influence. We present a model of such institutional...

A central requirement in the design of a legal system is the protection of law enforcers from coercion by litigants through either violence or bribes. The higher the risk of coercion, the greater the need for protection and control of law enforcers by the state. This perspective explains why, in...

This encyclopedia entry offers an overview of access to justice in the field of human rights. While the concept of access to justice is difficult to grasp, the entry identifies two primary ways in which it intersects with human rights: On the one hand, access to justice relates to the...

On 1 January 2021, the fee for bringing a migration case in the Federal Circuit Court increased almost five-fold. Civil society groups say that this change will seriously threaten access to the courts. This comment argues that, if this is correct, the increase might be unlawful or...

This contribution looks at the application of EU case law by the Ukrainian judiciary in the course of implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, which triggered unprecedented political, economic and legal reforms in Ukraine. Several issues form the focus of consideration in the...

From the vantage point of a world reorganized by the COVID-19 pandemic and riven with political and social conflicts, the book, New Pathways to Civil Justice in Europe (forthcoming 2020), is a powerful testament to how embedded dispute resolution systems are as normal facets of ordinary good...

In a recent series of articles, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert W. Vishny have argued that countries whose legal systems are based on civil law (especially of French origin) have systematically weaker environments for business than those whose legal...

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID) pandemic has challenged an array of democratic institutions in complex, unexpected and unprecedented ways. Little academic work, however, has considered the pandemic’s impact on Canada’s judicial institutions. This paper aims to fill that gap by...

We collect data on the rules and practices of financial and conflict disclosure by politicians in 175 countries. Although two thirds of the countries have some disclosure laws, less than a third make disclosures available to the public. Disclosure is more extensive in richer and more democratic...

This essay addresses core theoretical issues surrounding global/transnational legal pluralism, taking up the work of leading theorists. First, I demonstrate that global legal pluralism is very different from earlier versions of legal pluralism (postcolonial and sociological). Next, I expose the...

The key challenge to assessing the legal origins view of financial development is identifying exogenous changes in legal systems. We assemble new data on the British and French concessions in Shanghai between 1845 and 1936. Two regime changes altered the degree to which the British common and...

To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively...

I consider transactions involving asymmetric prisoners' dilemmas between pairs of players selected from two large populations. Games are played repeatedly, but information about cheating is not adequate to sustain cooperation, and there is no official legal system of contract enforcement. I...

Decisions concerning marriage, fertility, participation, and the education of children are explained using a two-stage game-theoretical model. The paper examines the effects of (i) family law (cost of obtaining a divorce, alimony, availability of quasi-marriages such as PACS in France, and civil...

In this paper, we analyze a class of models in which there are interjurisdictional spillovers among heterogeneous jurisdictions, as illustrated for instance by CO2 emissions that affect the global environment. Each jurisdiction's emissions depend upon the local stock of private capital. Capital...

The disclosure of corporate environmental performance is an increasingly important element of a firm’s ethical behavior. We analyze how the legal origin of foreign institutional investors affects a firm’s voluntary carbon disclosure. Using a large sample of firms from 36 countries, we show...

Much of legal biography is also attended by the criticism that it is written in a manner in which the personal life of the individual is detached from his (and it usually is his) legal or judicial accomplishments. Legal biography, more so than other forms of biography, has been dominated by what...

In cooperation with Lex Mundi member law firms in 109 countries, we measure and describe the exact procedures used by litigants and courts to evict a tenant for non-payment of rent and to collect a bounced check. We use these data to construct an index of procedural formalism of dispute...

We assemble new data on the British and French concessions in Shanghai between 1845 and 1936 to assess the legal origins view of financial development. During this period, two regime changes altered the degree to which the British common and French civil law traditions held jurisdiction over the...

The growth of business, especially small and medium scale enterprises are critical for employment generation in less developed countries. This study seeks to identify the role of the institutions of contract enforcement for business performance. Specifically, this paper, using a nationally...

This paper assesses two theories regarding the historical determinants of international differences in financial development. The law and finance theory holds that legal traditions differ in terms of the priority they attach to protecting the rights of private investors vis-a-vis the State and...