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 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...

U.S. regulatory agencies have been required to consider the equity and distributional impacts of regulations for decades. This paper examines the extent to which such analysis is done and provides recommendations for improving it. We analyze 187 cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) prepared by agencies...

Competition authorities have several tools at their disposal in crafting a competition policy. Most prominent are litigation and merger review. A less-recognized but often effective tool, however, is "competition advocacy." Broadly, competition advocacy is using persuasion, rather than coercion,...

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...

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...

While customary law is capable of creating universally binding rules, the rules that govern its formation allow states to gain an exemption from emerging norms of customary law by remaining persistent objectors. This form of objection requires the objecting state to take express action to oppose...

Several recent antitrust investigations involving the licensing of intellectual property rights (IPR) have raised concerns about fundamental due process and the alleged use of industrial policy in antitrust investigations to lower royalty rates, particularly for standard-essential patents...

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...

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...