In the United States insurance is regulated both by state insurance commissions and class action litigation. The interaction of these two systems has not been extensively studied. We examine four different facets of the regulation litigation tradeoff. The first is to examine whether a...

Because third-party funding and sales of legal rights are equivalent in terms of their economics, I examine arrangements in which third-party sales of legal rights are permitted today – waiver, subrogation, and settlement agreements. The existing arrangements provide valuable lessons for the...

On November 14, 2013, Professor Dervan was called to testify before the United States House of Representatives' Committee on the Judiciary Over-Criminalization Task Force. Available here is his written testimony. In his written testimony, Professor Dervan examines the phenomenon of...

We ask whether regulation can usefully supplement litigation in a model of optimal social control of harmful externalities. In our model, firms choose activity levels in addition to precautions. In contrast to the usual analysis, we assume that social returns to activity are higher than private...

The aim of this paper is to call for the need of a theoretical model of pharmaceutical products safety in which the two systems of regulation and liability operate complementarily. The question is why two legal tools that are meant to achieve and protect the same goal (protection of consumers)...

This book chapter explores how common law (state or federal) tort law evolves to fill regulatory voids. Particularly in areas that pose emerging, and incompletely understood, health and safety risks, common law tort liability holds out the potential for a dynamic regulatory response, one that...

Reasons for the joint use of ex ante regulation and ex post liability to cope with environmental accidents have been a longstanding issue in law and economics literature. This article, which includes the first empirical study of the French environmental legal system, analyzes courts’ decisions...

Within the past decade, the EU has made significant steps in strengthening and harmonising the legal framework of capital markets. Despite passing and amending secondary legislation on this topic, it only partially addressed the issue of enforcement, leaving private enforcement an issue for its...

In contrast to the whirlwind pace and the efficiency with which the science and commercialization of modern biotechnology have developed in the past few decades, the creation of an adequate and comprehensive regulatory regime for agricultural biotechnology has proven to be a lengthy and arduous...