Arbitration, as an alternative to litigation for contract disputes, reduces costs and time. While it has frequently been thought of as a substitute to pretrial bargaining and litigation, in fact, parties may be able to reach a settlement privately while engaged in the arbitration process....

Arbitrators are lead actors in global dispute resolution. They are to global dispute resolution what judges are to domestic dispute resolution. Despite its global significance, arbitral decision making is a black box. This Article is the first to use original experimental research to explore how...

We consider the formation and legal protection of secret agreements by analyzing a negotiated settlement between a harmed plaintiff and a culpable defendant that seeks to disenfranchise a second harmed plaintiff by keeping the existence (and details) of the instant settlement secret. This is...

Models of bargaining under incomplete information usually focus on the revelation of information between the participants in the existing negotiation. However, what if one of the participants wants the details (or the existence) of the negotiations to be kept secret? In such circumstances...

Arbitration, as an alternative to litigation for contract disputes, reduces costs and time. While it has frequently been thought of as a substitute to pretrial bargaining and litigation, in fact, parties may be able to reach a settlement privately while engaged in the arbitration process....

In their 1984 article, “The Selection of Disputes for Litigation,” Priest and Klein famously hypothesized a “tendency toward 50 percent plaintiff victories” among litigated cases. Nevertheless, many scholars doubt the validity of their conclusions, because the model they relied upon does...

International investment disputes arising out of investment treaties are a matter of heated debate and the appropriately normative method of channeling investment-related conflict is of increasing concern. This article serves two core purposes. First, it provides a detailed overview of...

[This student note is the closing chapter of the Harvard Law Review Developments in the Law Issue for the year 2000, devoted to developments in civil litigation.] Any discussion of recent developments in civil litigation must address the virtual revolution that has taken place regarding...

Empirical evidence suggests that lawyers and litigants are systematically optimistic with respect to the outcome at trial. Using evolutionary game theory, this paper seeks to provide a theoretical explanation for the persistence of the optimism bias. The adaptive force of optimism derives from...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of Bad Debt Loss Insurance on settlement outcomes. A huge success in a settlement or trial may turn into a disaster when the defendant goes bankrupt. Rainmakers face the following dilemma: the greater the success in court, the greater the defendant's...