Litigation aims at resolving conflicts. In this chapter we survey the law and economics literature on litigation to illustrate the scope of application of rent-seeking models and their analytical power in the study of law and procedural issues of litigation, including applications in adversarial...

In this contribution we focus on the role of experts in the assessment of tort damages from an economic point of view. We distinguish two different aspects.First, we examine the role which economists might play in assessing damages in tort cases. This approach focuses on the insights that Law...

A basic principle of law is that damages paid by a liable party should equal the harm caused by that party. However, this principle is not correct when account is taken of litigation costs, because they too are part of the social costs associated with an injury. In this article we examine the...

The Erie doctrine governs, among other things, when a federal court sitting in diversity jurisdiction may use a federal procedure that differs from the procedure that would be used in state court. Displacing the state procedure with the federal procedure (or not) may impact the substantive...

The Exxon Valdez litigation marathon - a protracted, two-decade-long battle over the propriety and constitutionality of the jury's $5 billion punitive damages award - provides a window into the past, present, and future of punitive damages. Acting akin to a common law court under federal...

Many have argued that thought should constitute per se unpatentable subject matter, and some have even suggested that any patent claim that includes a mental step should lie outside patentability. Many courts have long disagreed with such a draconian rule, and have instead upheld myriad patent...

As businesses move their confidential information onto computers, sensitive data gains the protection not only of state trade secret law, but also potentially of federal computer misuse statutes. The interaction between those two bodies of law, however, is more problematic than any commentator...

Conventional wisdom holds that the punitive damages class action is susceptible not only to doctrinal restraints imposed on class actions but also to constitutional due process limitations placed on punitive damages. Thus, it would seem that the prospects for punitive damages classes are even...