Because legal insurance policies cover the expenses of plaintiffs in bringing legal claims, such policies increase the risk of negligent or careless acts by tortfeasors. For this reason, potential tortfeasors would prefer to avoid injuring holders of legal insurance policies. Since insurance...

Recent evidence suggests that liquidated-damages clauses provide efficiency advantages by crowding out contracting parties' deontological concerns about efficient breach. In this paper we highlight an important downside to damage stipulations by parties. Based on findings obtained in a...

Aesthetic judgments are “dangerous undertakings” for courts, but they are unavoidable in copyright law. In theory, copyright does not distinguish between works on the basis of aesthetic values or merit (or lack thereof), and courts often go to great lengths to try to avoid artistic...

US power ‘elites’ are substantially less fair-minded than ‘non-elite’ general populations claims a study by Ray Fisman and coauthors [Science 349, 6254 (2015)]. This supposedly explains why US governments, run by people less fair than the citizens they represent, have been uninclined to...

Copyright enforcement is riddled with false positives. A false positive occurs when enforcement actions are taken against uses that are not actual infringements. Far from benign occurrences, copyright false positives inflict significant social harm in the form of increased litigation and...