Although institutions rooted in the folk theorem can support self-enforcing exchange in a wide variety of contexts, their potential to create cooperation is not limitless. In particular, the folk theorem may break down when some agents are physically stronger than others. I demonstrate this in...

Frey [2001] and others propose subjecting governments to competition within their jurisdiction, but classical liberals argue that having competing law enforcers cannot work. This article describes a hybrid system that relies on markets but has one law enforcement agency per region, with profit...

During the 19th century, markets exploded liberally before the state began to intervene to compensate for undesired social deterioration. In the second half of the 19th century, however, legislation largely locked up itself, except for laws which dealt mainly with technical modernization, such...

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject touncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...

Legal rules may be general (that is, applicable to a broad range of situations) or specific. Adopting a custom-tailored rule for a specific activity permits the regulator to make efficient use of information about the social costs and benefits of that activity. However, the rule maker typically...

The main goal of the court system is to differentiate between those who obeyed the law and those who did not. We describe a mechanism design framework that facilitates the characterization of a set of procedural mechanisms that would minimize the resources used to achieve this goal. This...

The legal and the economic perspective on a policy proposal are likely to differ far more fundamentally than is commonly appreciated. Economists will impose certain minimal requirements of rationality on the evaluation process, which lawyers routinely violate. Economists will expect the...

This paper empirically compares civil procedure in common-law and civil-law countries. Using World-Bank and hand-collected data, and unlike earlier studies that used predecessor data sets, this paper finds no systematic differences between common- and civil-law countries in the complexity,...

Existing studies of judicial decisionmaking have found that elected judges are more likely to dissent and to oppose judges from the same party. These findings are explained by elected judges having stronger preferences for risk or being more independent. In this paper, I offer an alternative...

This article considers how judges' political and racial backgrounds intersect with offender race under the United States Sentencing Guidelines. Using variation in judges' political affiliation and race at the district level and significant changes to Guidelines enforcement, I find that...