For many years the conventional wisdom on whether legal rules should be used to redistribute resources in society, or whether instead redistribution should be done exclusively through to the tax-and-transfer system, was considered an empirical question best resolved on a case-by-case basis. More...

This chapter asks whether THE THEORY OF INSURANCE SUPPORTS AWARDING PAIN AND SUFFERING DAMAGES IN TORTS. The answer is an unequivocal “Yes.” Many commentators have argued that individuals do not (and should not) demand insurance for losses that do not lower their marginal utility of wealth....

What information should courts utilize when assessing contract damages? Should they award damages that were rationally foreseeable at the ex ante stage (ex ante expected damages)? Or should they award damages at the ex post level, incorporating new information revealed after contracting (ex post...

This Article challenges a practice in tort law that is ubiquitous, yet little noticed—namely the use of race-based wage, life expectancy, and work-life expectancy tables when calculating damage awards. The practice results in damage awards that are significantly lower for black victims than...

Adam and Eve have the same record yet receive different punishment. Adam receives the punishment that they both deserve, whereas Eve receives a more lenient punishment. In this paper, we explore whether a deserved-but-unequal punishment, such as what Adam receives, can be just. We do this by...

Insurance companies are in the business of discrimination. Insurers attempt to segregate insureds into separate risk pools based on their differences in risk profiles, first, so that they can charge different premiums to the different groups based on their risk and, second, to incentivize risk...

We investigate the interaction between the law’s prohibition of recovery for unrequested benefits, and parties’ incentives at the ex ante stage to acquire information about the harms or benefits of the activities they consider engaging in. We analyze the impact of these interactions on the...

This article presents the first law and economics perspective on the topic of insurance law as a whole. In doing so it provides both an overview of insurance law as well as a discussion on the major themes of the economic analysis of insurance law and its leading cases. The paper also presents a...