Legal philosophers like Montesquieu, Hegel and Tocqueville have argued that lay participation in judicial decision-making would have benefits reaching far beyond the realm of the legal system narrowly understood. From an economic point of view, lay participation in judicial decision-making can...

The goal of this paper is to detect the degree to which court decisions control the stringency of employment protection and to investigate how such judicial discretion affects labor market performance. However, identification difficulty arises because court decisions are volatile against...

This paper argues that the consequences of the ‘fragmentation’ of the European patent system are more dramatic than the mere prohibitive costs of maintaining a patent in force in many jurisdictions. First, detailed analysis of judicial systems in several European countries and four case...

Due to judicial decisions the stock market prices are deemed to be the lower value limit in determining the compensations within structural measures according to German stock corporation law (e.g. squeeze-out of minority stockholders). By applying other valuation methods, in particular the...

This paper explores the prisoner's dilemma that may result when workers and firms are involved in labour disputes and must decide whether to hire a lawyer to be represented at trial. Using a representative data set of labour disputes in the UK and a large population of French unfair dismissal...

There have long been claims that compensations for noneconomic damages are random because tort law does not provide clear guidance regarding these compensations. I investigate, in both settled and tried medical malpractice cases, whether noneconomic damage payments are arbitrary and what...

Legal institutions play an important role in affecting delay in settlement. But little research has investigated the institutional causes of delay. The empirical literature is ambiguous regarding the impact of trial-court delay on settlement delay. I analyze the timing of bargaining and the...

Litigation seems to be a Pareto-ineffcient outcome of pretrial bargaining; however, this paper shows that litigation can be the outcome of rational behavior by a litigant and her attorney. If the attorney has more information than his client concerning the characteristics of the lawsuit, the...

Die vorliegende Studie befasst sich mit der Frage, inwiefern tendenziöses Entscheidungsverhalten von Richtern an deutschen Landesarbeitsgerichten theoretisch zu erwarten und statistisch zu belegen ist und inwieweit politische Einflussnahme auf die Rechtsprechung eine Rolle spielt. Die...

We consider a model of a single defendant and N plaintiffs where the total cost of litigation is fixed on the part of the plaintiffs and shared among the members of a suing coalition. By settling and dropping out of the coalition, a plaintiff therefore creates a negative externality on the other...