The appeals process - whereby a litigant disappointed with the decision of a first-order tribunal can seek reconsideration before a higher tribunal - is a widely observed feature of adjudication. What rationale can be offered for incorporation of an appeals process in a system of adjudication?...

When would an individual expect adherence to the law to advance the social good? This time-honored question is of more than intellectual interest, for if individuals have some desire to foster social welfare, the answer to it may help to explain and guide actual compliance with the law. In the...

Regulation and the negligence rule are both designed to obtain compliance with desired standards of behavior, but they differ in a primary respect: compliance with regulation is ordinarily assessed independently of the occurrence of harm, whereas compliance with the negligence rule is evaluated...

A basic question about litigation concerns the frequency of plaintiff victory at trial and how cases that go to trial relate to settled cases. In a stimulating paper, Priest and Klein advanced a model in which there is a tendency for plaintiffs to prevail at trial with probability 50 percent....

When is it socially advantageous for legal rules to be changed in the light of altered circumstances? In answering this basic question here, a simple point is developed-that past compliance with rules tends to reduce the social advantages of change. The reasons are twofold: adjusting to a new...

Fairness versus Welfare, we advance the thesis that social policies should be assessed entirely on the basis of their effects on individuals’ well-being. This thesis implies that no independent weight should be accorded to notions of fairness (other than many purely distributive notions). We...

This article studies the implications for the theory of deterrence of (a) the manner in which individuals' disutility from imprisonment varies with the length of the imprisonment term and (b) discounting of the future disutility and future public costs of imprisonment. Two questions are...