Jurisdiction and choice of law in property disputes has been remarkably stable. The situs rule, which requires adjudication where the property is located and application of that state’s law, remains the norm in most of the world. This article is the first to apply modern economic analysis to...

This essay surveys economic analyses of legal history. In order to make sense of the field and to provide examples that might guide and inspire future research, it identifies and discusses five genres of scholarship. Law as the dependent variable. This genre tries to explain why societies have...

In their 1984 article, “The Selection of Disputes for Litigation,” Priest and Klein famously hypothesized a “tendency toward 50 percent plaintiff victories” among litigated cases. Nevertheless, many scholars doubt the validity of their conclusions, because the model they relied upon does...

This article presents the results of the first rigorous attempt to collect settlement rate data from a substantial number of countries. Data on settlement were collected for twenty-three of the twenty-five largest economies. Settlement rates vary greatly, from below 15% in France, Belgium, and...

In a pre-registered 2×2×2 factorial between-subject randomized lab experiment with 61 federal judges, we test if the law influences judicial decisions, if it does so more under a rule than under a standard, and how its influence compares to that of legally irrelevant sympathies. The judges...