The legal community has been debating the question of who should select and provide expert witnesses at trial: the litigant or the judge? Using a persuasion-game framework, I show that there is a trade-off. On the one hand, the litigant is willing to consult an expert even when the judge is...

Should the party who loses in litigation be forced to pay the legal fees of the winner? This paper surveys the economic literature regarding the effects of legal fee shifting on a variety of decisions arising before and during the litigation process. Section 2 provides a brief survey of the...

Based on interviews of all UK based third party litigation funders the paper provides new empirical evidence on the nature, extent and type of third party funding of litigation. It also examines the emergence of new group or class action third party funders in Europe focused primarily on...

This paper examines the law and economics of third-party financed litigation. I explore the conditions under which a system of third-party financiers and litigators can enhance social welfare, and the conditions under which it is likely to reduce social welfare. Among the applications I consider...

This essay on the class action will be a chapter in the Procedural Law and Economics volume forthcoming from Edward Elgar. It reviews the law-and-economics literature on the class action, current as of 2008 (when I wrote the chapter). It discusses the benefits of large claim and small claim...

This paper empirically compares civil procedure in common law and civil law countries. Using World-Bank and hand-collected data, and unlike earlier studies that used predecessor data sets, this paper finds no systematic differences between common and civil law countries in the complexity,...

The hallmark of Judge Posner's class action decisions is rigorous review to ensure that aggregate litigation serves the best interests of class members and does not unduly pressure defendants to settle. Although he championed class actions, especially as a way to provide efficient justice in...