Rational politicians are interested in judicial independence (JI) in order to make their promises credible. But if politicians' preferences deviate from the dicta of the judiciary, they also have incentives to renege on judicial independence. These two conflicting aspects are measured by two...

This paper investigates the merits of different democratic institutions when politics is uni-dimensional, there is uncertainty both about the preferences of the future electorate and the future polarization of political parties, and politicians have better information about the state of the...

In their seminal 1972 article, "Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral," Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed proposed an analytic framework for comparing entitlements protected by property rules and liability rules. Their article has become one of the...

This article is the first sustained economic analysis of personal jurisdiction. It argues that plaintiffs should be able to sue where they purchased a product which caused injury. Such a rule allows manufacturers to set prices which take into account the quality of the forum state’s courts. If...

Public lawmakers have inadequate and misaligned incentives to engage in legal innovation. Private lawmaking is offered as a potential solution to this problem. However, private lawmaking faces a dilemma: In order to be effective, the cost-reducing standard forms produced by private lawdrafters...

We study the desirability of interventionist harmonization of legal standards across multiple, mutually interdependent jurisdictions which strive to adapt law to their local conditions, as well as to synchronize it with other jurisdictions. In a setting where jurisdictions are privately informed...

The NCAA maintains a balance between amateurism and the increasing need for generating revenue. In this balancing act, there are various policy considerations and legal constraints. These legal and policy entanglements bore such class action suits as Keller v. Electronic Arts, National...

More than 350 years ago, the English legal scholar John Selden complained that the chancery’s jurisdiction in equity depends on a variable standard that might as well be based on the length of the “Chancellor’s foot.” The “Chancellor’s foot” has since become proverbial shorthand...

A renewed attention to alternative dispute resolution (ADR) models give the cue for some observations in a comparative perspective: mediation is a good laboratory in order to observe cross-circulation of legal models for contemporary comparative law scholars. We witness here a recent convergence...