There is broad, though not universal, agreement that widespread voter ignorance and irrational evaluation of evidence are serious threats to democracy. But there is deep disagreement over strategies for mitigating the danger. 'Top-down' approaches, such as epistocracy and lodging more authority...

F.A. Hayek focused on many traditional economic questions, and also made important contributions to law and economics. His framework differed from Kaldor Hicks efficiency and the wealth maximization norm common among neoclassical law and economics scholars. But he talked about how the common law...

We analyze the interactions between social norms, the prevalence of regulated acts, and policies. These interactions are impacted by people's inability to directly observe actors' behavior. Norms are ineffective incentivizers when acts are committed either very frequently or very infrequently,...

In 1993, the Supreme Court established a new standard for the admissibility of expert evidence with its decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. Although whether Daubert actually has increased the reliability of expert evidence remains an open question, empirical research generally...

After North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC, it is clear that the antitrust laws have an important role to play in reforming occupational licensing, but the exact framework remains an open question. Under a rule of reason analysis, health and safety rationales are off limits. But...

Henry Manne wrote about many topics central to the law-and-economics canon but also over a period of more than a decade later in life worked on a theory of constitutional interpretation, producing a paper and lectures on this subject. His goal was to use insights from economics to improve...

U.S. law requires federal regulators to perform cost-benefit analysis of new rules proposed to correct market failure. As Coase convincingly showed decades ago, the inefficiencies of market failure can be usefully attributed to the costs of transacting. This essay proposes a novel and relatively...

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...

In this paper we study the strengths and weaknesses of the matching-reservations mechanism introduced by Article 21 of the Vienna Convention. When states face asymmetric incentives, the rules introduced by the Vienna Convention may not discourage all reservations. We also analyze the welfare...

Should law be provided centrally by the state or by some other means? Even relatively staunch advocates of competition such as Friedrich Hayek believe that the state must provide law centrally. This article asks whether Hayek’s theories about competition and the use of knowledge in society...