This paper studies how litigation and settlement behavior is affected by agents motivated by spiteful preferences under the American and the English fee-shifting rule. We conduct an experiment and find that litigation expenditures and settlement requests are higher for more spiteful...

This article compares the classic liability rules, negligence and strict liability, under the hypothesis that injurers and victims formulate subjective beliefs about the probabilities of harm. Parties may reasonably disagree in their assessment of the precautionary measures available: a measure...

The goal of this paper is to study how litigation and settlement behavior is affected by subjects motivated by spiteful preferences -- a potentially common driver for litigation behavior. We focus on litigation and settlement behavior both under the American and the English fee-shifting rule. To...

This chapter, based on a report presented on the occasion of the annual meeting of the German Society of Comparative Law in 2017, focuses on recent developments in the law of set-off and penalties/liquidated damages, highlighting specifically the decisions in Cavendish Square Holding BV v. Talal...

This chapter surveys the past and future role of experimental economics in legal research and practice. Following a brief explanation of the theory and methodology of experimental economics, the chapter discusses topics in each of three broad application areas: (1) the use of experiments for...

Negligence law seldom accounts for a person’s idiosyncrasies. The objective standard of care simply demands that people take reasonable care under the circumstances. One’s greater risk profile or ignorance of what the duty of care requires does not matter. A defendant breaches his duty of...

Most offenders plead guilty without a trial. Their guilty plea typically earns a reduced punishment. It raises the issue of why should guilty pleas matter. This chapter considers the use of plea bargaining in the United States and guilty plea discounts in England and Wales. While the former is...

This brief paper explores the correlation and potential relationship between the composition of the legal profession and trends in litigation, in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, we ask whether there is a positive correlation between the numbers of lawyers and paralegals licensed to practice in...

We study strategic behavior by private litigants when courts' judgments are "inalienable" in the sense that it is unlawful to contract around them ex post. Inalienable judgments arise in many contexts, including antitrust, labor law, intellectual property, unfair competition, and various types...

This article uncovers the role of framing in the determination of negligence. Negligence disputes fall into two categories: cases in which injurers inflicted harm while seeking to avoid a loss to themselves (loss frame), and those in which they were seeking to obtain a personal gain (gain...

In law school curriculum, the first-year tort law course is often caricatured as the class with the funky, sometimes amusing, fact patterns where people get injured—occasionally in bizarre ways—and attempt to recover from the party purportedly responsible. In legal scholarship, tort law has...

We read with interest Professors John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky’s new book, Recognizing Wrongs; Professor Catherine Sharkey’s Book Review; and Goldberg and Zipursky’s Response. Their exchange demonstrates that the field of tort law is alive. But is it well?Goldberg and Zipursky...

The Criminal Justice System should be inexpensive, speedy and efficient. This is essential for the smooth growth of the society as it is the primary duty of the state to administer inexpensive and speedy justice to its subjects. In Pakistan the criminal justice system has become expensive and...

The Securities and Exchange Commission has put forward for public comment that would mandate immediate disclosure of the acquisition of any equity swap position with a dollar value exceeding $300 million. This paper examines the proposal. I first show that the proposed rule would impose a...

When discussing the fairness of boilerplate consumer contracts, courts often rely on the criterion of symmetry: whether a given contractual provision applies equally to both parties. In many states, boilerplate provisions that apply solely to the consumer but not to the merchant are much more...

I review alternative normative and descriptive theories of legal standards of proof, as well as empirical evidence on how ordinary citizens interpret and apply these standards. Among the approaches I survey are decision theoretic accounts, the story model, constraint satisfaction models, the...

Trade regulation may never have been in more flux than it is nowadays. Apart from the emergence of ‘megaregionals’ (more recently, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – RCEP, or the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-pacific Partnership–CPTPP) and the difficulties in...

Responding to the growing importance of economic reasoning in legal scholarship, this innovative work provides an essential introduction to the economic tools which can usefully be employed in legal reasoning. It is geared specifically towards those without a great deal of exposure to economic...

The present value discount rate (PVDR) is the expected rate of return on the best alternative asset (BAA) the investor forgoes when purchasing an asset. How do we calculate it in the competitive market context? The Discounted Future Income Model projects an asset’s annual future income or...

The fields of law and economics are hallmarks of social sciences. Legal studies account for the oldest foundations of scholarly work and have ever since been part of academic institutions. Since the inception of the science of economics, this standardized way of measuring utility had rising...

One of the principal results in the economic theory of liability is that, assuming litigation is costless, the rule of strict liability with compensatory damages leads the injurer to choose the socially appropriate level of care. This paper reexamines this result when litigation is costly. It is...

I study how voluntary disclosure of information affects outcomes in plea bargaining. A prosecutor negotiates a sentence with a defendant who privately knows whether he is guilty or innocent. The prosecutor can gather evidence regarding the defendant's type during negotiations, and a trial...

This paper presents a model of prosecutors' decision-making processes in which prosecutors (both federal and state) internalize some of the benefits of reducing crime, but also care about developing their own human capital. Since U.S. attorneys make their decision first, they have the...

As is typical of a Breyer opinion, Unicolors v. H&M—the only IP decision this Term—illuminates the distinction between mistakes of fact and of law and explains the reasoning by virtue of a brief hypothetical. Imagine someone (named John) who sees a flash of red in a tree and blurts out,...

The SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus is an external shock to all societies with lasting impacts that have changed individual, political, and corporate decisions profoundly. Increasing evidence reveals that an estimated 10-50% of those previously infected with COVID-19 face a longer-term or long-term...

Contract law has one overarching goal: to advance the legitimate interests of the contracting parties. For the most part, scholars, judges, and parties embrace this party primacy norm, recognizing only a few exceptions, such as mandatory rules that bar enforcement of agreements that harm others....

If rule of law discourages relationship-specific investments, then industries that use intermediates which require relationship-specific investments should have a disproportionately low share of output in countries where rule of law is weak. We find robust support for this prediction using data...

The fraud triangle is well-known and has been applied for many years in explaining a variety of white-collar crimes. Equally, the Dark Triad of psychological traits has been applied in definitions of individuals who exhibit a range of criminal activities. In this paper, the concept of financial...

Each year law school clinics provide free legal assistance to tens of thousands of clients, most of whom would otherwise go unrepresented. The work of clinics allows clients to advance or defend their rights or obtain assistance or funds to which they are entitled, assistance that is in many...

We study the economics of litigation with a particular focus on litigation finance. Based on an extensive data set covering civil lawsuits reported by U.S. Federal Courts since 1977, we first present a set of stylized empirical facts about lawsuits at the trial phase. Grounded in these insights,...

This study aims to analyze the juridical review of consumer protection from the perspective of the Job Creation Act and how the effectiveness of existing dispute resolutions resolves these problems. Technological developments change the order of values and human life, one of which is economic...

A philosophical account that appears to be gaining momentum of late among legal philosophers is that law is an artifact. Artifacts are generally understood by philosophers to be intentionally created functional objects, and the intended function determines what kind of artifact it is. Artifact...

We propose simple mathematical models for the legal concept ofbalancing of interests, to resolve the conflict between the rights toprivacy and to the protection of personal data in Art. 7 and Art. 8 ofthe EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EUCh) against the right ofaccess to information derived...