Contract scholarship has given little attention to the production process for contracts. The usual assumption is that the parties will construct the contract ex nihilo, choosing all the terms so that they will maximize the surplus from the contract. In fact, parties draft most contracts by...

Conventional wisdom holds that boilerplate contract terms are ignored by parties, and thus are not priced into contracts. We test this view by comparing Greek sovereign bonds that have Greek choice-of-law terms and Greek sovereign bonds that have English choice-of-law terms. Because Greece can...

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. We advocate a legal reform that would allow homeowners to reduce principal while giving mortgage holders an equity interest. Such a plan...

In recent years, a controversy has erupted over the distinction between employees and independent contractors. Commentators have argued that in the modern “gig economy,” many people traditionally classified as independent contractors are as vulnerable as employees and should be granted the...

Cost-benefit analysis is analyzed using a model of agency delegation. In this model an agency observes the state of the world and issues a regulation, which the president may approve or reject. Cost-benefit analysis enables the president to observe the state of the world (in one version of the...

This survey of the law and economics of consumer finance discusses economic models of consumer lending, and evaluates the major consumer finance laws in light of them. We focus on usury laws, restrictions on creditor remedies such as the ban on expansive security interests, bankruptcy law,...

According to entrenched conventional wisdom, the president enjoys considerable advantages over other litigants in the Supreme Court. Because of the central role of the presidency in the U.S. government, and the expertise and experience of the Solicitor General's office, the president usually...

Recent literature has suggested that antitrust regulation is an appropriate response to labor market monopsony. This article qualifies the primacy of antitrust by arguing that a significant degree of labor market power is “frictional,” that is, without artificial barriers to entry or...

In the last several years, economists have learned about an antitrust problem of vast scope. Far from approximating the conditions of perfect competition as long assumed, most labor markets are characterized by monopsony — meaning that employers pay workers less than their productivity because...

Recent empirical studies have revealed that labor market monopsony is far more common than previously thought, and that there is a strong correlation between wage suppression and labor market concentration. Yet few antitrust cases have been brought by workers against employers who exercise...