Witnesses often gain by slanting testimony. Courts try to elicit the truth with perjury rules. Perjury is not truth-revealing; truth revelation is, however, possible. With a truth-revealing mechanism the judge will get little testimony because the defendant will not present witnesses with...

We claim that Posner's nuisance rule maintains the efficiency feature even under severe informational asymmetry. This paper, as a critical assessment of an overly complicated order-reporting mechanism by Kim [2002], argues that Posner's original value-reporting mechanism alone is enough to...

In trials witnesses often slant their testimony in order to advance their own interests. To obtain truthful testimony, the law relies on cross-examination under threat of prosecution for perjury. We show that perjury law is an imperfect truthrevealing mechanism. Moreover, we develop a...

This study incorporates the concept of time into an analysis of patent litigation and licensing. We show that increasing imitation or litigation costs with a longer imitation lag or litigation time may have effects on licensing, settlement, and fees other than increasing the pecuniary costs. A...

Conventional economic analysis of organizational behavior in the face of legal incentives has largely ignored the concept of "corporate culture." Building on recent work in economics as well as contributions from sociology and social psychology, this paper suggests that the emergence of belief...

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...

This paper proposes a theoretical analysis of final-offer arbitration in which disputants may be represented by lawyers who can be paid by flat, contingent, or conditional fees. We derive the equilibrium lawyers' efforts to defend their clients and the equilibrium parties' proposals made to the...

We explore the sensitivity of the clinical decisions of physicians to the standards of care expected of them under the law, drawing on the abandonment by states over time of rules holding physicians to standards determined by local customs and the contemporaneous adoption of national-standard...

We consider what we call the Sheriff of Nottingham hypothesis : that the government of Brazil, which at the same time is party to litigated cases and the enforcer of tax laws, constantly enacts norms that seek to strengthen its side. We test this hypothesis and observe that litigants adapt to...

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...