After inventing the intermittent windshield wiper, Robert Kearns tried to interest the “Big Three” automakers in licensing this technology. After rejecting his proposal, these companies all began using his patent without his permission and installing intermittent wipers on their cars. When...

Is it fair and just to charge men and women identical life insurance premiums despite their different actuarial risk? What about charging the old and the young different premiums? As entities whose core business is to classify people based on their actuarial risk, should private insurance...

Tragedy of the human commons is a special case of tragedy of the commons in which the common resource is composed of human beings. Because humans, unlike trees or fish, behave strategically and because the welfare of humans, unlike that of trees or fish, matters for its own sake, tragedy of the...

Should there be pain-and-suffering damages in tort law? Most legal economists say no. Some scholars have reached this conclusion through pure theory. Others have done empirical or experimental work to explore the desirability of pain-and-suffering damages, yet they have reached the conclusion...

We evaluate the effect of tort reform on employer-sponsored health insurance premiums by exploiting state-level variation in the timing of reforms. Using a dataset of healthplans representing over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006, we find that caps on non-economic damages,...

Sometimes the rules let you change the rules. In civil procedure, many rules are famously rigid—for example, neither parties nor the judge can stipulate to subject matter jurisdiction—but closer inspection yields many ways that judges or parties (individually or by agreement) can change...