The general standard of proof in civil litigation is preponderance of the evidence. To prevail, the plaintiff must establish the case with a probability exceeding .5. We argue that since litigants tend to take the status quo as the reference point, dismissal of a claim is likely to be perceived...

Building on Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory, this paper presents a series of experiments designed to reveal people's preferences regarding attorneys' fees. Contrary to common economic wisdom, it demonstrates that loss aversion (rather than risk aversion or incentivizing the lawyer to win...

Two studies test whether people believe in optimal deterrence. The first provides people with personal injury cases that are identical except for variations in the probability of detection and explores whether lower probability cases produce higher punitive damage awards and whether higher...

According to a standard principle in free-speech law, the remedy for falsehoods is more speech, not enforced silence. But empirical research demonstrates that corrections of falsehoods can backfire, by increasing people’s commitment to their inaccurate beliefs, and that presentation of...

Recent empirical work demonstrates that healthy people make large mistakes when evaluating the welfare of those suffering from apparently serious health problems. Significant adverse conditions often inflict little or no hedonic damage-sometimes because people adapt to them, and sometimes...

In many settings, human beings are boundedly rational. A distinctive and insufficiently explored legal response to bounded rationality is to attempt to debias through law by steering people in more rational directions. In many domains, existing legal analyses emphasize the alternative approach...