Which of the three legal doctrines of public use, just compensation, and due process is the most effective in constraining abuses of eminent domain power? This paper addresses this question for the first time and presents the first-ever systematic investigation of the judicial review of eminent...

The Italian judicial system is notoriously slow, with an estimated backlog of five million cases. We use a sample of 652,174 court cases in Turin to study the role that various adjudication procedures play in judicial timeliness. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the procedures...

Asking the right question can be as important as giving the right answer. In her book Judging Civil Justice, Dame Hazel Genn forcefully argues that the right question about the civil justice system is not “how much justice we can afford” but “how much justice can we afford to forego.”...

In this essay, we discuss empirical research on the economic effects of the civil justice system. We discuss research on the effects of three substantive bodies of law—contracts, torts, and property—and research on the effects of the litigation process. We begin with a review of studies of...

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates from inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the...

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...