This Essay explores the relationship between normative law and economics and legal theory. We claim that legal theory must account for law's coerciveness, its normativity, and its institutional structure. Economic analyses that engage these features are an integral part of legal theory, rather...

The legal institution of trust gives rise to two basic sets of question. The first set concerns the respective rights held by the trustee and the beneficiary with respect to the trust property — do these rights feature a structure characteristic of property, contract, or something in between....

Assumption of risk — the notion that one cannot complain about the harmful state to which one has willingly exposed oneself — figures prominently in our extra-legal lived experience. In spite of its deep roots in our common-sense morality, the tort doctrine of assumption of risk has long...

"The outcome-based approach assesses the privatization of the provision of a good or a service by reference to the quality or quantity of its provision. Private provision is desirable when private entities make better - more efficient, just, etc.- decisions with respect to the relevant...

Private law theory must confront the plurality of values that inform the problems that private law addresses in practice. We consider Hanoch Dagan's and Michael Heller's The Choice Theory of Contracts as a case-study in the promise and perils that embracing plural values poses for private law...

Contract theorists approach value pluralism in three ways: (a) Capitulation: the theorist shows how a single value – e.g., efficiency or community – explains a rule or an area and implies normative recommendations; (b) Leveraging: the theorist shows how multiple values that theorists find...

This paper reports a rigorous experimental test of Pareto-damaging behaviors. We introduce a new graphical representation of dictator games with step-shaped sets of feasible payoffs to persons self and other on which strongly Pareto efficient allocations involve substantial inequality. The...

The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their success at changing the legal landscape depends...