There is an enormous literature analyzing the choice between rules and standards in drafting legal directives. This literature typically focuses on public government-made legal directives such as statutes, regulations, and judicial opinions; it has devoted less attention to privately-drafted...

This article is part of a symposium on the work of Gordon Tullock, to be held in connection with the presentation to Tullock of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders at the Atlas Research Foundation, for his contributions to the study of spontaneous...

Judges and scholars debate whether trade secrecy’s normative foundations make the most sense when grounded in tort, contract, equity, unjust enrichment, unfair competition, or confidentiality norms. To help settle that debate, this Article applies a taxonomy of the private law developed in...

The economic analysis of civil procedure can be enriched by a more thorough consideration of the productive functions of civil adjudication. The previous literature has recognized that civil adjudication does have products – conventionally described as dispute resolution services, plus...

States and the federal government have enacted laws intended to police franchisors' use of termination provisions in franchise contracts to opportunistically take over profitable establishments. This regulation may, however, reduce the total number of chain outlets because franchising is a...

Standard-setting organizations (SSOs) typically require their members to declare whether they hold standard-essential patents (SEPs) or disclose which SEPs they own, and to commit to licensing SEPs on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND) terms. The apparent vagueness of FRAND...

This comment on the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) draft Strategic Plan FY 2014-FY 2018 addresses two areas that the Commission should consider. First, the Commission should integrate economic analysis into its consumer protection mission to the same degree that it has into its competition...

In 1989, Barry Harris & Joseph Simons developed a quantitative method to implement the Horizontal Merger Guidelines' hypothetical monopolist test with a market-level “critical loss” analysis. The appeal of Harris & Simons' framework is that it created a simple, intuitive approach to...

Twenty-five years ago Richard Epstein published Simple Rules for a Complex World, which would go on to become one of Epstein's most influential works. This essay, prepared for a conference and symposium to celebrate the anniversary of the book, applies the insights of Simple Rules in the context...

Optimal remedies should be grounded in consumer harm. The caselaw interpreting the FTC's ability to obtain equitable monetary relief, however, has strayed far from this benchmark. Rather than requiring the FTC to show the marginal impact of deception, courts presume that everyone exposed to...