Many human rights advocates believe that development agencies - agencies that define their mission as providing economic and technical aid to impoverished countries should be required to respect and promote human rights law. This style of human rights imperialism should be resisted. While...

The housing crisis threatens to destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of value by causing homeowners with negative equity to walk away from their houses. A house in foreclosure is worth 30 to 50 percent less than a house that a homeowner either retains or sells on the market, and a foreclosed...

The international law of state responsibility determines when states are liable for international law violations. States are generally liable when they have control over the actions of wrongdoers; thus, the actions of state officials can implicate state responsibility whereas the acts of private...

The international law of state responsibility determines when states are liable for international law violations. States are generally liable when they have control over the actions of wrongdoers; thus, the actions of state officials can implicate state responsibility whereas the acts of private...

The debate over common ownership initiated by Azar, Schmalz, and Tecu’s paper on airlines has raised questions about what, if any, policy responses are appropriate when common owners reduce competition in product markets. This paper, a response to a symposium for Antitrust Bulletin, reviews...

Law professors routinely accuse each other of making politically biased arguments in their scholarship. They have also helped produce a large empirical literature on judicial behavior that has found that judicial opinions sometimes reflect the ideological biases of the judges who join them. Yet...

International organizations use a bewildering variety of voting rules — with different thresholds, weighting systems, veto points, and other rules that distribute influence unequally among participants. We provide a brief survey of the major voting systems, and show that all are controversial...

The standard model of judicial behavior suggests that judges primarily care about deciding cases in ways that further their political ideologies. But judicial behavior seems much more complex. Politicians who nominate people for judgeships do not typically tout their ideology (except sometimes...

This paper builds on contributions to a Conference on Benefit-Cost Analysis of Financial Regulation, held at the University of Chicago, to show how benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of financial regulations should be conducted. Our major themes are that (1) on theoretical grounds, BCA should be easier...

Democratic institutions aggregate preferences poorly. The norm of one-person-one-vote with majority rule treats people fairly by giving everyone an equal chance to influence outcomes, but fails to give proportional weight to people whose interests in a social outcome are stronger than those of...