During the Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th century, the United States replaced litigation by regulation as … enforcement strategy between litigation and regulation based on the idea that justice can be subverted with sufficient expenditure … environment of significant inequality of wealth and political power. The switch to regulation can then be seen as an efficient …

Attempts to curb undesired behavior through regulation gets complicated when agents can adapt to circumvent enforcement …

This article surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law -- the use of public agents (inspectors, tax auditors …, police, prosecutors) to detect and to sanction violators of legal rules. We first present the basic elements of the theory … examine a variety of extensions of the central theory, concerning accidental harms, costs of imposing fines, errors, general …

This note reexamines the theory of optimal public enforcement when litigation costs are incurred if the defendant is …

This chapter of the forthcoming Handbook of Law and Economics surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law … of the central theory, including: activity level; errors; the costs of imposing fines; general enforcement; marginal …