The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures in criminal investigations. The Supreme Court has interpreted this to require that police obtain a warrant prior to search and that illegally seized evidence be excluded from trial. A consensus has developed in the law and...

Over the past decades Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has emerged as an important nonparametric method of evaluating performance of decision making units through benchmarking. Although developed primarily for measuring technical efficiency, DEA is now applied extensively for measuring scale...

A handful of economically distressed cities and counties are considering using their power of eminent domain to write down the principal of underwater mortgage loans. Analogous to the condemnation of tangible real estate for public use, the city would “take” intangible mortgage loans from...

This paper examines the demographic pattern of friendship links among youth and the impact of those patterns on own educational outcomes using the friendship network data in the Add Health. We develop and estimate a reduced form matching model to predict friendship link formation and identify...

This review essay discusses and appraises Douglas Allen’s The Institutional Revolution (2011) as a way of reflecting on the uses of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) in economic history. It praises and defends Allen’s method of asking “what economic problem were these institutions...

There is a century long history of economic and financial education laced with implications for both political civic education. It has been argued by some economists that since economics is based on rational self-interested “agents” we don’t need to teach economics at the undergraduate...

The concept of collective responsibility, or group punishment, for crimes or other harmful acts was a pervasive feature of ancient societies, as exemplified by the Roman doctrines of quasi-delicts and noxal liability, and the Greek notion of “pollution.” This chapter briefly surveys...

This paper presents an economic theory of property, tort, and contract law based on the goal of efficiently governing economic exchange relationships. In the theory, legal boundaries emerge endogenously in response to exogenous differences in the nature of the underlying transaction concerning...

This article considers the relevance of hypotheses developed in the "law and economics" literature regarding settlement/trial decisions in the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it explores the applicability of the "selection principle" and "50 percent plaintiff win-rate" formulated by George Priest...

In 2008 the faculty senate of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) decided to publish mean student evaluations of teaching online. The stated goal of the policy was to “provide useful information to students as they design their program of study.” Using...