In 2017, Professor Alexandra Lahav of the University of Connecticut School of Law published an impressive book entitled In Praise of Litigation. She argues that private civil litigation in the United States is an important tool for democracy. In the preface and introduction, she explains how...

Patent settlements between rivals restrain competition in many different ways. Antitrust requires that their anticompetitive effects are reasonably commensurate with the firms’ expectations about (counterfactual) patent litigation. Because these expectations are private and non-verifiable,...

We study strategic behavior by private litigants when courts' judgments are "inalienable" in the sense that it is unlawful to contract around them ex post. Inalienable judgments arise in many contexts, including antitrust, labor law, intellectual property, unfair competition, and various types...

Efficiency defence and merger remedies are key components in most merger control regimes. Although in many jurisdictions both the provision of efficiency-related evidence and remedy offers are at the merging firms' discretion, most previous works have only analysed them separately. This paper is...

Private antitrust litigation often involves a dominant firm being accused of exclusionary conduct by a smaller rival. In such cases, the defendant generally has a much larger financial stake in the outcome. We explore the implications of this asymmetry in a model of litigation with endogenous...

In both the US and the EU, the antitrust category of “sham litigation” (in the US) or “vexatious litigation” (in the EU) enables a plaintiff, or a defendant in case this action forms part of a counterclaim, to argue that the introduction of litigation may constitute, under certain...

In tort litigation, delayed settlement or impasse imposes high costs on the parties and society. Litigation institutions might influence social welfare by affecting the likelihood of out-of-court settlement and the potential injurers' investment in product safety. An appropriate design of...

We consider strategic behavior in non-Coasean litigation: private disputes such that the court's judgment may influence the final allocation of rights even if transaction costs are zero. This occurs when the law prohibits otherwise-profitable efforts to contract around the court's judgment. This...

To date the experience of the incidence of private actions for damages in antitrust cases has differed markedly across jurisdictions. The procedural rules surrounding private litigation may account for some of these differences. This paper explores the effect of rules concerning contribution...

This chapter deals with the enforceability of U.S. opt-out class actions in continental Europe, with special attention to Italy, France and Spain. The study sets out by a thorough analysis of U.S. precedents concerning the availability of extra-compensatory damages in complex litigation (among...