The Fifth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to silence, blocking the court from drawing adverse inferences from the defendant's silence. This article investigates the conditions under which extending such protection to civil defendants might increase (or decrease) social...

In this article, we ask the basic question: Is it necessarily the case that allowing or promoting settlement of lawsuits enhances social welfare? Our answer is not necessarily; there are circumstances where actually prohibiting settlement generates more social welfare than allowing it....

In a recent article, Lyon and Rasmusen (2004) argue that buyer-option contracts are more effective at solving the holdup problem than has been previously recognized. This article examines the robustness of that claim to changes in the bargaining game they analyze and to changes in the nature of...

We consider a model of crime with rational Bayesian Jurors. We find that if jurors are not perfectly informed, even when there is no limit to the size of the punishment that can be imposed, it is not possible to deter all crime. There is a finite lower bound on the crime rate which results from...

The prevailing view in the law and economics literature is that preventing firms and consumers from contracting out of mandatory liability rules is optimal only if consumers are irrational or misperceive the risks of the products they buy. In this paper, I show that even if consumers do...

The Coase Theorem suggests that married couples will divorce if and only if doing so increases their joint surplus, regardless of the legal rules governing divorce. This does not mean, however, that divorce laws only affect the distribution of rents. Because the distribution of rents affects...