In September 1998, the Judicial Conference of the United States abandoned its latest attempt to regulate the timing of interviews and offers in the law clerk selection process. This paper surveys the further unraveling of the market since then, makes comparisons with other entry level...

Two recent failures of the U.S. intelligence system have led to the creation of high-level investigative commissions. The failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11 prompted the creation of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004), or 9/11 Commission.The...

The world-wide and ongoing rise in obesity has generated enormous popular interest and policy concern in developing countries, where it is rapidly becoming the major public health problem facing such nations. As a consequence, there has been a rapidly growing field of economic analysis of the...

Several theories have been advanced to explain the observed pattern of government regulation of the economy. These include the "public interest" theory and several versions, proposed either by political scientists or by economists, of the "interest group" or "capture" theory. This article...

Efficient legal rules are central to efficient resource allocation in a market economy. But the question whether the common law actually converges to efficiency in commercial areas has remained empirically untested. We create a data set of 461 state court appellate decisions involving the...

It is no longer a secret that a lawyer arguing a case before the Supreme Court is more likely to lose if he is asked more questions than his opponent during oral arguments. This paper rigorously tests that hypothesis and the related hypothesis that a lawyer is more likely to lose if he is asked...

The noted jurist argues that during times of economic downturns, the aversion to uncertainty of consumers and business people rises. This is a notion embedded, he argues, in the thinking of both John Maynard Keynes and Frank Knight. One conclusion is that government stimulus is necessary in such...

This paper discusses problems in economic analysis of law arising from the increased specialization of academic practitioners of this subfield of economics, which takes as its subject a uniquely fluid, contestable, and inveterately normative subject—namely, the law. As a result of the limited...

With the rise of the law and economics movement, the focus of economic analysis of intellectual property has begun to shift to more concrete and manageable issues concerning the structure and texture of the complicated pattern of common law and statutory doctrines, legal institutions and...

We believe that at a deeper level the independent judiciary is not only consistent with, but essential to, the interest-group theory of government. Part I of this paper explains our theory of the independent judiciary. Part II discusses several implications of the theory, relating to...