Over the past decade, a number of well-publicized data leaks have revealed the secret offshore holdings of high-net-worth individuals and multinational taxpayers, leading to a sea change in cross-border tax enforcement. Spurred by leaked data, tax authorities have prosecuted offshore tax cheats,...

This paper comprises a transcript of the oral addresses and discussion at a colloquium that compared the general anti-avoidance rule of income tax law with the civil law doctrine of Rechtsmissbrauch (abuse of law) and similar doctrines in eight jurisdictions: Germany, Croatia, New Zealand,...

This year marks the 90th anniversary of both the percentage depletion allowance and the Joint Committee on Taxation. This essay relates the curious tale of Norman Beecher, a New York maritime lawyer with little background in energy, natural resources, or tax, who convinced Congress in 1918 to...

This essay on the class action will be a chapter in the Procedural Law and Economics volume forthcoming from Edward Elgar. It reviews the law-and-economics literature on the class action, current as of 2008 (when I wrote the chapter). It discusses the benefits of large claim and small claim...

What information should courts utilize when assessing contract damages? Should they award damages that were rationally foreseeable at the ex ante stage (ex ante expected damages)? Or should they award damages at the ex post level, incorporating new information revealed after contracting (ex post...

The “legal origins” scholarship of the past decade has created controversy both in its application of quantitative methods to comparative law and in its claims that common law is better than civil law for economic development. These controversies have unleashed a storm of criticism by...

Efforts to conjoin the disciplines of law and macroeconomics raise two main challenges. The first is choosing the specific macroeconomic framework that is to be employed, since there are conflicting possibilities. This is an exercise in economic analysis of law because the difficulty lies in the...