In recent years, patent protection has extended into new areas, giving rise to serious concern about the lack of clear guidelines for patentability. We analyze the effect of introducing a patent opposition process that would allow patent validity to be challenged directly after a patent is...

This paper advocates opening up international securities regulation to greater regulatory competition than the scant competition that exists at present. After sketching the contours of an international regime of regulatory competition in securities laws and the reasons why such competition is...

Abortion may prevent the birth of "unwanted" children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, which implies the...

This paper is the second part of a review of the event study methodology, which has proved to be one of the most successful uses of econometrics in policy analysis. In this part we focus on the methodology's application to corporate law and corporate governance issues. Event studies have played...

When insider trading prohibitions limit the ability of insiders (or of a corporation itself) to use material non-public information to trade a particular firm's stock, there may be incentive to use the information to trade instead on the stock of that firm's rivals, suppliers, customers, or the...

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' Majority Report on the 2000 Presidential vote in Florida presents two types of empirical evidence that African-Americans were denied the right to vote. The report concluded that, "The Voting Rights Act prohibits both intentional discrimination and 'results'...

This Article argues that recent developments in economic theory provide a new rationale for the dichotomous approach of land use arrangements in the law of servitudes that is almost universal in the modern Western legal tradition. The treatment of certain land-related promises as enforceable...

Criminal law can justly lay claim to being the native domain of law and economics. From Bentham to Becker, no area of law has been more brightly illuminated by the radiance of economic logic.Not coincidentally, in no other area of the law has the conflict between economics and ordinary moral...

Trust implies confidence, but not certainty, that some person or institution will behave in an expected way. A trusting person decides to act in spite of uncertainty about the future and doubts about the reliability of others' promises. The need for trust arises from human freedom. As Piotr...

The Logic of Collective Action has for decades supplied the logic of public policy analysis. In this pioneering application of public choice theory, Mancur Olson ele gantly punctured the premise -- shared by a diverse variety of political theories -- that individuals can be expected to act...