Most employment-law rights are mandatory. Individual workers cannot decline the protections the law gives them. For example, a nonexempt worker must get at least $7.25 per hour and time-and-a-half for overtime, even if she would agree to less. A worker's pension must vest within five years. If...

The most overworked figure in our society may be the unemployment rate. Newscasters, politicians, and economists use it in discussing everything from the overall health of the economy to the merits of alternative welfare programs. Despite its widespread use, however, the unemployment rate...

Professor Posin is to be congratulated on his recent article in this Review, "The Coase Theorem: If Pigs Could Fly," for creating a precise example that purports to disprove the Coase Theorem. Legal scholarship should strive more towards verifiable or falsifiable statements about the law. Of...

In this article, Professor Schwab compares the union member-leader relationship to the corporate shareholder-manager relationship and examines what can be learned from the voluminous literature regarding corporate control about problems of internal union democracy. Specifically, he questions...

Ronald Coase's The Nature of the Firm (The Firm) may well be the second most cited article in law and economics. Usually, calling something second best is a backhanded compliment. But in this case the praise is sincere, for Coase also wrote the most cited article, The Problem of Social Cost...

Despite the theoretical importance of the Coase Theorem, scholars have given surprisingly little attention to verifying its predictions empirically. Supporters often accept the theorem as dogma, while armchair critics assail its assumptions. In an exciting series of recent articles, however,...

The contingent work force is rising. Policymakers and analysts must respond. These are the central themes of Dr. Belous's paper in this symposium. Twenty-five to thirty percent — his current upper- and lower-bound estimates of the size of the contingent work force — are the basic statistics...

This article first parses the multiple overlapping definitions of discrimination, including distinctions between group and individual discrimination and between segregation and discrimination in pay. The article then summarizes the major economic models of discrimination, particularly Becker's...