In the past few decades, economic analysis of law has been challenged by a growing body of experimental and empirical studies that attest to prevalent and systematic deviations from the assumptions of economic rationality. While the findings on bounded rationality and heuristics and biases were...

The basic rule in civil litigation is that the plaintiff carries the burden of proof and the general standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence. The plaintiff prevails if she establishes her case with a probability exceeding 0.5. Drawing on insights from behavioral economics and new...

This is a review of three new books on U.S. contract law and theory: Brian H. Bix, Contract Law: Rules, Theory, and Context (Cambridge 2012); Douglas G. Baird, Reconstructing Contracts (Harvard 2013); and Melvin A. Eisenberg, Foundational Principles of Contract Law (Oxford, forthcoming 2014)....

The market for legal services, and particularly lawyers' Contingent Fee (CF) arrangements, have been extensively studied from legal, economic and sociological standpoints, but curiously not from a behavioral perspective. Building on Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory, this paper presents a...

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...

Economic analysis, and economic analysis of law in particular, ordinarily assumes that paternalism and efficiency are incompatible bases for analyzing and evaluating rules and actions. Most economists reject paternalism as inefficient. By appealing to the theoretical foundations of normative...

Why is tort law much more developed than unjust enrichment law? Is there a reason for the very different legal treatment of governmental takings and governmental givings? Why are contract remedies structured around the four ‘interests’ and why is the disgorgement interest only marginally...

This is a Review of Guido Calabresi’s fascinating and thought-provoking new book, The Future of Law and Economics (presented in a book symposium held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in December 2016). The Review proposes to break the notion of commodification, as used by Calabresi, into...

This is a chapter of our book titled Law, Economics, and Morality (OUP, 2010), in which we propose to integrate threshold deontological constraints (and options) with cost-benefit analysis, thus combining economic methodology with moderate (threshold) deontological morality. This chapter...