There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject touncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...

This article derives the optimal award to a winning plaintiff and the optimal penalty on a losing plaintiff when the probability of prevailing varies among plaintiffs. Optimality is defined in terms of achieving a specified degree of deterrence of potential injurers with the lowest litigation...

The problem of establishing the amount of losses covered by public and private insurance is often characterized by asymmetric information, in which the claimant already knows the extent of a loss but this can be demonstrated to the insurer only at a cost. It is shown that a simple arrangement,...

A model of patent infringement is developed to analyze the relationship between litigation and aspects of the legal environment such as the probability that the patent is found valid, the size of legal fees and their allocation across agents. Potential challengers first decide whether to...

We report the results of the first comparative study of the determinants and effects of patent oppositions in Europe and of re-examinations on corresponding patents issued in the United States. The analysis is based on a dataset consisting of matched EPO and US patents. Our analysis focuses on...

Das deutsche System der industriellen Beziehungen weist im internationalen Vergleich gemeinhin ein hohes Mass an Verrechtlichung auf. Umso ueberraschender ist der Umstand, dass das Recht und seine Akteure, Institutionen und Verfahren in der Forschung ueber Arbeitsbeziehungen seit Jahrzehnten...

Dieser rechtssoziologische Beitrag untersucht den geringen Grad der Inanspruchnahme arbeitsrechtlicher Schutzangebote im Feld der unter- und undokumentierten Beschaeftigung von Migrant/innen. Analysiert werden Rahmenbedingungen und Prozesslogik der Mobilisierung von Arbeitsrecht mit Fokus auf...

Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, we study how geography affects university knowledge spillovers. Citations to patents decline sharply with distance and are strongly constrained by state borders. The effect of distance on citations to scientific...

We collect a new dataset on capital punishment in the US and we propose a test of racial bias based upon patterns of sentence reversals. We model the courts as minimizing type I and II errors. If trial courts were unbiased, conditional on defendants race the error rate should be independent of...

We study how the market for innovation affects enforcement of patent rights. Conventional wisdom associates the gains from trade with comparative advantage in manufacturing or marketing. We show that these gains imply that patent transactions should increase litigation risk. We identify a new...