Since the issue first arose in earnest in the 1970s, courts have struggled to create rules for causation in toxic tort cases that are both consistent with longstanding tort principles and fair to all parties. Faced with conflicting and often novel expert testimony, scientific uncertainty, the...

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...

The economic analysis of civil litigation has focused on the action of the litigants and on the effects of substantive and procedural rules on their behavior. This chapter focuses on the economic analysis of procedural rules and how these rules alter the incentives of the litigants to file,...

The US patent system is a foundation of our nation's economy, encouraging innovation and growth. The exclusive right to use and license an invention provides numerous benefits to its inventor and to the broader economy. The patent system is not costless, however, and significant costs stem from...

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...

I examine how firms strategically bundle news reports to offset the negative effects of a privacy breach disclosure. Using a complete dataset of privacy breaches from 2005 to 2014, I find that firms experience a small and significant 0.27% decrease in their stock price on average following the...

In most areas, economists look to competition to align incentives, but not so with courts. Many believe that competition enables plaintiff forum shopping, but Adam Smith praised rivalry among courts. This article describes the courts when the common law developed. In many areas of law, courts...

The overruling of prior case law is one of the most dramatic events in a common-law system, and the rate of overrulings is often considered an important measure of legal change. To measure this process more precisely, and thereby elucidate the relationship between legal doctrines of stare...

This chapter examines the basic model of the law and economics of litigation. Because the Rules of Civil Procedure and the Economics of the Litigation/Settlement decision are covered in separate chapters of this volume, this chapter will focus on private civil litigation, in particular the...

Patent Assertion Entities (“PAEs”) are playing a growing role in the United States, but also in Europe. Their activities are controversial in that while they may be a source of efficiencies, they may also create anticompetitive harm. Given the growing trend of operating companies...