The law influences the behavior of its citizens in various ways. Well understood are the direct effects of legal rules. By imposing sanctions or granting subsidies, the law either expands or contracts the horizon of opportunities within which individuals can satisfy their preferences. In this...

We set up a model of costly information production between two lobbies, a firm and a consumer group, competing for influence over an imperfectly informed but benevolent government. The government is endowed with a parametric amount of information and chooses the best policy from a finite,...

I distinguish four types of goals: self-interested, altruistic, moralistic, and moral. Moralistic goals are those that people attempt to impose on others, regardless of the others' true interests. These may become prominent in political behavior such as voting because such behavior has...

Like many other areas of law, the development of environmental law has been strongly influenced by notions of fairness. This should not be surprising, since environmental law has been developed by lawyers, who are self-selected to be fairness-oriented and trained to think in terms of fairness....

In this paper Professor Strahilevitz addresses the question of why individual members of peer-to-peer file-swapping networks such as Napster, Gnutella, and Kazaa consciously choose to share their unlicensed copies of copyrighted content with anonymous strangers despite the absence of economic...

We offer a selective survey of the uses of cooperative and non-cooperative game theory in the analysis of legal rules and institutions. In so doing, we illustrate some of the ways in which law influences behavior, analyze the mechanism design aspect of legal rules and institutions, and examine...

Do the parties in a typical dispute face incentives similar to those in the classic prisoner's dilemma game? In this paper, we explore whether the costs and benefits of legal representation are such that each party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while...

Do the parties in a typical dispute face incentives similar to those in the classic prisoner's dilemma game? In this paper, we explore whether the costs and benefits of legal representation are such that each party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while...

In this paper we provide a strategic explanation for the spontaneous convergence of legal rules but which nevertheless, in many instances, falls short of unification across jurisdictions. We identify a free-riding problem and discuss its implications for legal integration. We argue that...

Current international patent rules strike an uneasy balance between conflicting views about patents. The precarious nature of this balancing act is illustrated by the recent heated debate about the conditions under which compulsory licenses will be available for certain essential medicines under...