This paper offers the conjecture that interest groups act where there are cycling majorities or other aggregation anomalies. The claim is that instability attracts political activity. This simple conjecture suggests a link between voting paradoxes, or puzzles of aggregation, and questions about...

Virtually every burden of proof is influenced by a rule regarding relitigation. In criminal law, the prosecutor is prevented from repeatedly drawing from the urn, as it were, by the double-jeopardy rule, which reinforces the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard. We suggest that if law were to...

This article shows that for virtually every move toward privatization or, moving in reverse, toward the reopening of access to property, there are conflicting explanations. One is transaction-cost based and optimistic, while the other implicates interest groups and arouses suspicions rather than...