The economic literature on enforcement is generally pessimistic concerning the use of legal aid. In this paper we show that legal aid can be a part of optimal law enforcement. The rationale behind our result is that with legal aid, in a system with legal or judicial error both guilty and...

Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgment; under conditional fees the lawyer gets an upscale premium if the case is won which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a principal-agent framework where the lawyer chooses...