In cases involving multiple defendants, each defendant's incentive to settle is influenced by the setoff rule enforced in the relevant jurisdiction. This article suggests that the effect of a setoff rule depends on whether the setoff is conditional on a finding that the settling defendant or...

Thirteenth-century England was a commercial backwater whose trade was dominated by foreigners. To accommodate and encourage foreign merchants, England modified its legal system by creating legal institutions that were available to both domestic and foreign traders. Among the most important of...

This article analyzes public and private law enforcement when the government is motivated by rent seeking. A rent-seeking government seeks primarily to maximize revenue. The article concludes as follows: (1) if offenders have sufficient wealth, a rent-seeking government is more aggressive than a...

Priest and Klein argued in 1984 that, because of selection effects, the percentage of litigated cases won by plaintiffs will not vary with the legal standard. Many researchers thereafter concluded that one could not make valid inferences about the character of the law from the percentage of...

This article assesses the impact of changes in judicial independence on equity markets. North and Weingast (1989) argue that judicial independence and other institutional changes inaugurated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688--89 improved public and private finance in England by putting...

The "antidirector rights index" has been used as a measure of shareholder protection in over a hundred articles since it was introduced by La Porta et al. ("Law and Finance." 1998, Journal of Political Economy 106:1113--55). A thorough reexamination of the legal data, however, leads to...

This paper empirically compares civil procedure in common-law and civil-law countries. Using World-Bank and hand-collected data, and unlike earlier studies that used predecessor data sets, this paper finds no systematic differences between common- and civil-law countries in the complexity,...