International organizations use a bewildering variety of voting rules — with different thresholds, weighting systems, veto points, and other rules that distribute influence unequally among participants. We provide a brief survey of the major voting systems, and show that all are controversial...

Normative law and economics remains controversial decades after its emergence despite its successes in legal scholarship and its similarity to influential approaches in economics. The reason is that many of its proponents have exaggerated its value for policy while discounting other methods,...

There is considerable variation in countries’ respect for human rights. Scholars have tried to explain this variation on the basis of current conditions in countries—such as democracy and civil war—and events from the recent past, such as ratification of human rights treaties. This...

The standard form of electoral system in the United States — plurality voting with one person, one vote — suffers from countless defects, most of which stem from its failure to enable people to register the intensity of their preferences for political outcomes when they vote. Quadratic...

There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origins of a country—that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law—profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal...

Law professors routinely accuse each other of making politically biased arguments in their scholarship. They have also helped produce a large empirical literature on judicial behavior that has found that judicial opinions sometimes reflect the ideological biases of the judges who join them. Yet...

The debate over common ownership initiated by Azar, Schmalz, and Tecu’s paper on airlines has raised questions about what, if any, policy responses are appropriate when common owners reduce competition in product markets. This paper, a response to a symposium for Antitrust Bulletin, reviews...

Minimum capital regulations play a central role in banking regulation. Regulators require banks to maintain capital above a certain level in order to correct incentives to make excessively risky loans and investments. However, it has never been clear how regulators determine how high or low the...

The standard model of judicial behavior suggests that judges primarily care about deciding cases in ways that further their political ideologies. But judicial behavior seems much more complex. Politicians who nominate people for judgeships do not typically tout their ideology (except sometimes...

This paper builds on contributions to a Conference on Benefit-Cost Analysis of Financial Regulation, held at the University of Chicago, to show how benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of financial regulations should be conducted. Our major themes are that (1) on theoretical grounds, BCA should be easier...