We examine the evolution of fishing rights in colonial Bengal through a series of cases heard at the Calcutta High Court in the 1880s and culminating in the passage of legislation in 1889. We posit an implicit relational contract between the colonizing British and the landowning class in...

This essay applies a simple economic model of the plea bargaining process to the two-tiered structure of negotiated pleas and sentences in South Africa. Bargaining in South Africa proceeds along one of two tracks. A formal procedure, authorized and regulated by s 105A of the Criminal Procedure...

Louis Brandeis was the greatest opponent of industrial "bigness," but not the first. This essay considers his ideas about policy toward large-scale firms in the context of the controversy in the Supreme Court over the interpretation of the Sherman Act between 1890 and 1911. Opponents of bigness...

This is the introduction to The Exchange Order: Property and Liability as an Economic System, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. It briefly describes the exchange order, the comprehensive social system comprising explicit markets, tort liability and criminal liability. These institutions...

This essay considers firms as collective social actors from three perspectives associated with individualism. Ontologically, it describes firms as constantly changing relational contracts that define roles and relationships among the participants, and argues that the characteristic routines and...