Abstract Introduction to the special issue on the Kauffman Foundation Conference on Intellectual Property and Innovation, held at St. Louis (USA) on April 2-3, 2009. This conference was organized by the Center on Law, Innovation and Economic Growth of the Washington University School of Law, and...

There is a remarkable tendency in modern legal systems to increasingly use carrots. This trend is not limited to legal systems but can also be observed in, for instance, parenting styles, social control mechanisms, and even law schools' teaching methods. Yet, at first glance, sticks appear to be...

Reducing income inequality is, in the eyes of many, one of the major political issues of this time. The conventional political approach to reduce income inequality is to raise taxes for the wealthy and redistribute the proceeds to the poor. This approach finds support in the economic literature,...

A fundamental scholarly norm holds that those who make normative statements should reveal their normative framework. I argue that all those who reject Kaldor-Hicks as the fundamental framework violate this fundamental scholarly norm by being non-transparent in some way."Kaldor-Hicks efficiency"...

Most people sign standard term contracts without reading them. This gives drafters an incentive to insert one-sided, inefficient terms. This problem can be solved directly by giving the drafter a duty to draft efficient terms, or indirectly by giving the signer a duty to read (which may remove...