Kolstad, Ulen and Johnson (1990) have conjectured that exclusive use of negligence liability leads to suboptimal choice of precaution in the presence of uncertainty and that ex ante regulation can correct these inefficiencies. We complete their argument by making a mild additional premise.

The efficiency of two different means of controlling hazardous economic activities, namely ex post liability for harm done and ex ante safety regulation, is re-examined. Some researchers have stressed that the complementary use of these two instruments can be socially advantageous. Here it is...

One of the most fundamental issues every legal system must address is the form of protection that should be given to legal entitlements. Calabresi & Melamed offered a simple, elegant criterion for choosing between property rules and liability rules, namely transaction costs. Property rules...

In some cases, the law permits a party that unilaterally provides a benefit to another party to recover the estimated value of this benefit. Despite calls for expanding the set of cases to which such a restitution rule applies, the law commonly applies a mutual consent rule under which a party...

This article discusses fraudulent consent to sexual intercourse as a defense to paying child support. In two separate cases, men had intercourse with women they were not married to. The women bore babies as a result and then sought child support payments from the fathers. The men said that the...

Recent years have witnessed explosion in copyright literature on potential indirect liability of providers of dual-use technologies - technologies that are capable of infringing and noninfringing uses. The existing literature, however, fails to identify several important characteristics of...

Written by a leading expert in copyright valuation, the paper reviews critical considerations for estimating damages in litigation regarding musical compositions and sound recordings. These valuations can also be related to matters involving breach of contract, tortuous interference, personal...

Fines and damages are the principal sanctions of criminal, civil and regulatory law. Yet in law it does not matter who pays money sanctions. Damages overwhelmingly are paid by insurers and the cost of insurance premiums loaded into commodity prices and thus dispersed among consumers. Fines are...

Copyright and the First Amendment exist in tension. The Supreme Court acknowledges this tension but says that copyright law resolves it with two built-in free speech safeguards: (1) by protecting only the expression of ideas and not the ideas themselves (the idea/expression dichotomy); and (2)...

Ever wonder how you got that camera, television, or other product so cheap? The most likely answer is that it probably came from a “gray market” source. One of the most vexing and problematic areas of international trade for manufacturers has been “gray market” or “parallel...