Public lawmakers lack incentives to engage in a socially optimal amount of legal innovation. Private lawmaking is a potential solution to this problem. However, private lawmaking faces a dilemma: In order to be effective privately produced laws need to be publicly enacted, but under current law...

Private law presents itself in normative language - in the language of rights, duties, obligations, and so on. This language presumes that private law tells citizens how they ought to behave. It is striking, therefore, that contemporary legal theorists often explain and evaluate private law with...

In Greece there is no established discipline of law and economics yet, if by this we mean a coherent body of work and a group of scholars dedicated to its promotion. There are only some recent and hesitant attempts by some scholars to introduce law and economics to Greek legal bibliography and a...

This paper explores under what conditions social stigma exists as an additional sanction in criminal law from a behavioral law and economics perspective. A distinction is made between the court as an institution specialized at discovering and assigning blame and the rest of the society that...

The overruling of prior case law is one of the most dramatic events in a common-law system, and the rate of overrulings is often considered an important measure of legal change. To measure this process more precisely, and thereby elucidate the relationship between legal doctrines of stare...

Economic Principles of Law, published in May/June 2007 by Cambridge University Press, applies economics to the doctrines, rules and remedies of the common law. In plain English and using non-technical analysis, it offers an introduction and exposition of the 'economic approach' to law - one of...

When is it socially advantageous for legal rules to be changed in the light of altered circumstances? In answering this basic question here, a simple point is developed - that past compliance with legal rules tends to reduce the social advantages of legal change. The reasons are twofold:...

The law of charitable trusts in New York provides a wonderful example of the complexity of legal change. We hope to show that the so-called “restrictive” policy followed by New York was not really a legal policy of the state in the sense that it represented a rule deliberately designed to...

This paper contains the conclusions from the work of the Economic Impact Group (EIG), a part of the CoPECL Network of Excellence funded by the EU to prepare a Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR). Part 1 revisits basic principles which are central to the work of the whole group. For one,...

Although proponents argue that peremptory challenges make juries more impartial by eliminating “extreme” jurors, studies testing this theory are rare and inconclusive. For this article, two formal models of jury selection are constructed, and various selection procedures are tested, assuming...