This introduction to Methodology in Private Law Theory: Between New Private Law and Rechtsdogmatik (Thilo Kuntz and Paul B. Miller, eds., Oxford University Press, forthcoming) provides a thematic overview methodological questions and positions taken in contemporary American and German private...

In the thirty years since Calabresi and Melamed's seminal Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral, scholars have divided protection for legal entitlements into two major types: property rules and liability rules. In this Article, we uncover an overlooked,...

Laws governing relations between spouses have undergone profound changes that continue to revolutionize the standards and procedures for dissolutions of marriage. The most dramatic changes in divorce law have come from the advent of no-fault divorce, the decline in spousal maintenance awards,...

This article uses the context of tort reform legislation to trace the impact of legislation on the principles and operation of tort law, and to analyse the continuing role of the common law in an age of statutes. Broad legislative reforms raise a number of questions of statutory interpretation...

The optimal scope of legal harmonization and the desirable patterns of lawmaking vary according to current legal, social and economic conditions. In this paper we specify a positive and testable hypothesis according to which legal systems respond to exogenous changes in the external environment...

This article is part of a symposium on the work of Gordon Tullock, to be held in connection with the presentation to Tullock of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders at the Atlas Research Foundation, for his contributions to the study of spontaneous...

Although the pure economic loss rule has been remarkably durable in the common law, it suffers from a theoretical deficit. The rule has not been properly framed within the broader context of Anglo-American political economy. Any theory must recognize that the rule fundamentally deals with...

An increasing amount of literature links the quality of institutions and governance to economic performance across the economies. In this respect, the maintenance of rule of law plays a critical role, for it encourages growth, investments and innovations, and firm growth and business...

Basic economic analysis of litigation funding shows that risk neutral plaintiffs without budget constraints will not accept funding unless they are pessimistic relative to the funder. Risk aversion makes a plaintiff who shares probabilistic beliefs with the funder act observationally equivalent...