By reinterpreting Savage's axioms as axioms of the social rationality over resource allocations, we derive a social welfare function encompassing individual social values and a social attitude towards distributional inequality. Wealth maximization becomes the purpose of law only if individuals...

Decisions about intervention can be understood as decisions about tolerance, because an act of tolerance is an act of nonintervention, and, conversely, an act of intervention can be understood as an act of intolerance. But acts of tolerance, typically made under conditions of epistemic...

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...

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...

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...

Stock exchanges are financial institutions in rapid transition. Their organizational structure still varies to a considerable degree. This articles joins in the quest for an optimal organizational design for modern stock exchanges. From both a historical and comparative perspective it adopts,...

One of the main purposes of American labor law has been to reduce conflict between employers and workers. This paper discusses the ways in which various doctrines might serve this purpose. Four theories are examined: bargaining with asymmetric information; conflict; herding; and trust. The...

In several landmark cases, the European Court of Justice has ruled that member states of the European Union are liable for damages caused by an infringement of European Law if the violation is sufficiently serious. This article analyses the incentive effects of liability rules on member states...