The law is not a bunch of scattered rules, it is a body. This simple statement suffices to demonstrate that consistency is crucial for the law. Esteemed philosophers radicalise the statement: If it stops being consistent, to them the law is no longer the law. Consequently, consistency must be an...

Dieses Paper untersucht "property rights" im Stile der ökonomischen Analyse des Rechts. Dabei wird der Zusammenhang zwischen "property rights" und Allokationseffizienz ebenso behandelt wie der Schutz von "property rights" durch Unterlassungs- und Schadenersatzansprüche, durch Haftungsregeln...

Der Beitrag befaßt sich mit der Frage, inwieweit dem Strafrecht ein Eigengewicht im staatlichen Sanktionensystem zukommt. Im Kern geht es dabei um die wechselseitige Beziehung zwischen Strafrecht und Zivilrecht, die paradigmatisch durch die Stichworte "Strafe und Schadenersatz" oder...

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject to uncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...

Social engineering refers to deliberate attempts, often under the form of legislative moves, to promote changes in customs and norms that hurt the interests of marginalized population groups. This paper explores the analytical conditions under which social engineering is more or less likely to...

The novel part of this paper is a model of the principle of proportionality, as the cornerstone of the doctrine of fundamental rights. German law, and with some modifications also the law of the European Community and the European Convention on Human Rights, do not categorically outlaw...

Public lawmakers lack incentives to engage in a socially optimal amount of legal innovation. Private lawmaking is a potential solution to this problem. However, private lawmaking faces a dilemma: In order to be effective privately produced laws need to be publicly enacted, but under current law...

Private law presents itself in normative language - in the language of rights, duties, obligations, and so on. This language presumes that private law tells citizens how they ought to behave. It is striking, therefore, that contemporary legal theorists often explain and evaluate private law with...

In Greece there is no established discipline of law and economics yet, if by this we mean a coherent body of work and a group of scholars dedicated to its promotion. There are only some recent and hesitant attempts by some scholars to introduce law and economics to Greek legal bibliography and a...

This paper explores under what conditions social stigma exists as an additional sanction in criminal law from a behavioral law and economics perspective. A distinction is made between the court as an institution specialized at discovering and assigning blame and the rest of the society that...