Adaptable property-rights institutions, we argue, foster economic development. The British example illustrates this point. Around 1700, Parliament established a forum where rights to land and resources could be reorganized. This venue enabled landholders and communities to take advantage of...

To explore damage rules’ deterrent effect, we use a public good experiment to tailor allowable punishment to rules used in actual civil litigation. The experimental treatments are analogous to: (1) damages limited to harm to an individual litigant, (2) damages limited to harm to a group...

This paper studies how community notification of criminal registries affects neighborhood behavior and shows that notification is not always optimal. Using a game-theoretic model of a neighborhood, I establish optimal information disclosure policies when law-abiding neighbors’ actions generate...

This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed nämndemän) to make three contributions to the literature on jury decision-making: (i) an assessment of whether systematic biases...

This paper uses data from 700+ felony trials in Sarasota and Lake Counties in Florida from 2000-2010 to examine the role of age in jury selection and trial outcomes. The results imply that prosecutors are more likely to use their peremptory challenges to exclude younger members of the jury pool,...

This survey paper starts from the basic, and intuitive, assumption that judges are human and as such, can be modeled in the same fashion we model politicians, activists, managers: driven by well-defined preferences, behaving in a purposive and forward-looking fashion. We explore, then, the role...

During Britain's industrialization, Parliament operated a forum where rights to land and resources could be reorganized. This venue enabled landholders and communities to exploit economic opportunities that could not be accommodated by the inflexible rights regime inherited from the past. In...

The number of asbestos personal injury claims filed each year is in the hundreds of thousands and has been increasing rather than decreasing over time, even though asbestos stopped being used in the early 1970's. Eighty firms have filed for bankruptcy due to asbestos liabilities including 30...

In this paper we consider the potential effects that the application of a loser-pays-all rule may have on criminal litigation, including the decision to prosecute, criminal deterrence and legal error. We find that the effects of fee shifting on deterrence and on miscarriage of justice go in...