It is often observed in the literature on customary international law that the identification practice of the International Court of Justice for customary norms deviates from the traditional definition of customary law in Art. 38 (1) lit. b of the ICJ Statute. However, while there are many...

Apparently judges’ decisions are not motivated by maximizing their own profit. The literature uses two strategies to explain this observation: judges care about the long-term monetary consequences for themselves, or individuals who are more strongly motivated by the common good self-select...

Judges and juries frequently must decide, knowing that they do not know everything that would be relevant for deciding the case. The law uses two related institutions for enabling courts to nonetheless decide the case: the standard of proof, and the burden of proof. In this paper, we contrast a...

In an experimental study we investigated effects of information amount and legal training on the judgment accuracy in legal cases. In a two (legal training: yes vs. no) x two (information amount: high vs. low) between-subjects design, 90 participants judged the premeditation of a perpetrator in...

Legal realists expect prosecutors to be selfish. If they get the defendant convicted, this helps them advance their careers. If the odds of winning on the main charge are low, prosecutors have a second option. They can exploit the ambiguity of legal doctrine and charge the defendant for vaguely...

The US Supreme Court has the power of certiorari. It may pick its fights. As a beneficial side effect, the court may allocate its resources, in particular the time and energy the justices spend on a case, to worthy causes. In economic parlance, this discretion makes the court more efficient....

The novel part of this paper is a model of the principle of proportionality, as the cornerstone of the doctrine of fundamental rights. German law, and with some modifications also the law of the European Community and the European Convention on Human Rights, do not categorically outlaw...

Criminal procedure is organized as a tournament with predefined roles. We show that assuming the role of a defense counsel or prosecutor leads to role induced bias even if people are highly motivated to give unbiased judgments. In line with parallel constraint satisfaction models for legal...

The law is not a bunch of scattered rules, it is a body. This simple statement suffices to demonstrate that consistency is crucial for the law. Esteemed philosophers radicalise the statement: If it stops being consistent, to them the law is no longer the law. Consequently, consistency must be an...

In law and economics, it is standard to model legal rules as an opportunity structure. The law's subjects maximize expected profit, given these constraints. In such a model, the reaction to legal innovation is immediate. This is not what we observe after class action is introduced into Israeli...