"The efficiency of common law rules is central to achieving efficient resource allocation in a market economy. While many theories suggest reasons why judge-made law should tend toward efficient rules, the question whether the common law actually does converge in commercial areas has remained...

In the past, judges have often hired applicants for judicial clerkships as early as the beginning of the second year of law school for positions commencing approximately two years down the road. In the new hiring regime for federal judicial law clerks, by contrast, judges are exhorted to follow...

"The world-wide and ongoing rise in obesity has generated enormous popular interest and policy concern in developing countries, where it is rapidly becoming the major public health problem facing such nations. As a consequence, there has been a rapidly growing field of economic analysis of the...

This paper examines the evolving role played by the Coase theorem over the several editions of Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law. In doing so, the paper shows both the grounding of Posner’s efficiency norm in the theorem’s logic and his increasing emphasis on the theorem’s...

When an industry is monopolized, price rises above and output falls below the competitive level. Those who continue to buy the product at the higher price suffer a loss, but this loss is exactly offset by the additional revenue that the monopolist obtains by charging the higher price. Other...

A major challenge to social theory is to explain the pattern of government intervention in the market - what we may call "economic regulation." Properly defined, the term refers to taxes and subsidies of all sorts as well as to explicit legislative and administrative controls over rates, entry,...