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...

This paper empirically compares civil procedure in common law and civil law countries. Using World-Bank and hand-collected data, and unlike earlier studies that used predecessor data sets, this paper finds no systematic differences between common and civil law countries in the complexity,...

The hallmark of Judge Posner's class action decisions is rigorous review to ensure that aggregate litigation serves the best interests of class members and does not unduly pressure defendants to settle. Although he championed class actions, especially as a way to provide efficient justice in...

Concerned about evidence distortion arising from litigants' strong incentive to misrepresent information to fact-finders, legal scholars and commentators have long suggested that the court appoint its own advisor for a neutral piece of information about the dispute. This paper studies the...

This chapter examines the basic model of the law and economics of litigation. Because the Rules of Civil Procedure and the Economics of the Litigation/Settlement decision are covered in separate chapters of this volume, this chapter will focus on private civil litigation, in particular the...

We study the economics of litigation with a particular focus on litigation finance. Based on an extensive data set covering civil lawsuits reported by U.S. Federal Courts since 1977, we first present a set of stylized empirical facts about lawsuits at the trial phase. Grounded in these insights,...

The goal of this paper is to study how litigation and settlement behavior is affected by subjects motivated by spiteful preferences -- a potentially common driver for litigation behavior. We focus on litigation and settlement behavior both under the American and the English fee-shifting rule. To...