Litigation finance refers to investments in litigation by a third person not originally a party to the suit. Whether the country should embrace this new practice has sparked debate among the bar, on the Hill, in the press, and between scholars. We disagree with the premise of this debate;...

A well-functioning justice system is indispensable to business activity and to a society as a whole. Judicial efficiency measured by trial length, one of the essential factors in the effectiveness of the justice system, ensures contract enforcement, which is the basis of market transactions....

The study focuses on the admissibility and assessment of economic expertise in EC competition law litigation. I start by exploring the broader issues raised by the integration of economic expertise in litigation: in particular the risk of moral hazard and adverse selection because of the...

The aim of this paper is to analyze from an economic perspective the effects of the judicial careers arrangement on the trials' outcome. The institutional organization of judicial careers follows two distinct ideal systems. One is characterized by the fact that public prosecutor and judge belong...

The practice of horizontal stare decisis requires that judges occasionally decide cases "incorrectly''. What sustains this practice? Given a heterogeneous bench, we show that the increasing differences in dispositions property of preferences generates gains when judges trade dispositions over...

We develop a model that determines when and how time-consistent and forward-looking courts should set and reform legal rules (a normative theory for dynamically efficient courts.) We explicitly take into account that: 1) the optimal rules most likely are not the same for all periods of time; 2)...

We draw together concepts from political science, law, and economics to model discretionary actions by agents in a weak hierarchical system, wherein agents at a higher level cannot directly discipline those at a lower level. In particular, we model the decision by an appeals court judge to...

We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex-ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex-post the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred, and decides...

The aim of this study is to elucidate whether arbitration offers advantages compared to the patent litigation system which is currently existing in Germany. To answer this question three essential characteristics of the current German patent litigation system are presented, i.e. the economic...