To change the law, an interest group must choose between lobbying the legislature and litigating for new precedent. Lobbying becomes more likely as the relative benefits from rule change become greater, as the costs of lobbying become smaller and as the voting strength of the interest groups...

Absent efficiency-cultivating judges, is selective litigation alone enough to drive the common law to efficiency? To address this question, the common law is viewed as an evolving network of precedents. Litigants nominate the most inefficient precedents for re-adjudication and judges modify...

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...

By applying computational linguistics tools to the analysis of US federal district courts' decisions from 1932 to 2016, this paper quantifies the rise of economic reasoning in court cases that range from securities regulation to antitrust law. I then relate judges' level of economic reasoning to...

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...

Legal liability for accidents determines the circumstances under which injurers must compensate injurers for harm. The effects of liability on incentives to reduce risk, on risk-bearing and insurance (both direct coverage for victims and liability coverage for injurers), and on administrative...

This is a survey of legal liability for accidents. Three general aspects of accident liability are addressed. The first is the effect of liability on incentives, both whether to engage in activities (for instance, whether to drive) and how much care to exercise (at what speed to travel) to...