Why do successful constitutions have the attributes characteristically associated with the rule of law? Why do constitutions involve public reasoning? And, how is such a system sustained as an equilibrium? In this paper, we adapt the framework in our previous work on “what is law?” to the...

The American Bar Association and its state-level brethren control and regulate the legal profession, determining who can provide legal services, how those providers are trained, and what business forms those providers can use. This professional regulation limits what may be offered as a legal...

In the last two decades, the economy has undergone fundamental transformation with the twin structural changes of a great increase in the size of global markets and the internet-driven development of a platform for global exchange and work processes. These changes have transformed the economic...

Law in modern market societies serves both democratic and economic functions. In its economic function, law is a service, a means of enhancing the value of transactions and organizations. Yet modern market economies continue to rely on the state, rather than the market, to provide this service....

In recent years there has been a renewed effort to ground conventional law and economics methodology, with its exclusive focus on efficiency and income redistribution through the tax system, in modern welfare economics (Kaplow & Shavell 1994, 2001). This effort raises a challenge to the...

Recent efforts to assess whether or not the trial is vanishing from the civil justice system, have thus far not drawn distinctions between cases in which the market efficiency function of the legal system is in play and those in which democratic and political functions are in play. As Marc...

If trials have been vanishing from the federal courts in the past few decades, it matters, from a normative perspective, whether this trend reflects an increase in private settlements (as many assume) or an increase in public non-trial adjudication. In this paper I investigate the coding of...

Law in modern market societies serves both democratic and economic functions. In its economic function, law is a service, a means of enhancing the value of transactions and organizations. Yet modern market economies continue to rely on the state, rather than the market, to provide this service....

If trials have been "vanishing" from the federal courts in the past few decades, it matters, from a normative perspective, whether this trend reflects an increase in private settlements (as many assume) or an increase in public non-trial adjudication. In this paper I investigate the coding of...

One of the fundamental contributions of transaction cost theory and institutional economics has been to focus attention on opening the "black box" of contract enforcement, drawing attention to the institutions required to achieve effective and low-cost contract enforcement. The idea that the...