This article translates and extends Becker (1968) from public law enforcement to private litigation by examining optimal legal system design in a model with private suits, signals of case strength, court error, and two types of primary behavior: harmful acts that may be deterred and benign acts...

The last few decades have seen a dramatic shift in the admissibility of expert testimony in American courtrooms from a laissez-faire approach to a strict standard for admissibility, often called the Daubert test. The implicit rationale behind such a stringent standard for admissibility is the...

Concerned about evidence distortion arising from litigants' strong incentive to misrepresent information to fact-finders, legal scholars and commentators have long suggested that the court appoint its own advisor for a neutral piece of information about the dispute. This paper studies the...

This chapter presents a strategic model of incentives for care and litigation under asymmetric information and self-serving bias, and studies the effects of damage caps. Our main findings are as follows. First, our results suggest that the defendant's bias decreases his expenditures on accident...

This chapter examines the basic model of the law and economics of litigation. Because the Rules of Civil Procedure and the Economics of the Litigation/Settlement decision are covered in separate chapters of this volume, this chapter will focus on private civil litigation, in particular the...

We formally analyze the effects of legal presumptions in patent litigation. We set up a novel contest model to study litigation outcomes, judgement errors, and resource dissipation under three alternative presumption criteria: a presumption that the patent is valid; a presumption that the patent...

This paper examines the effect of judicial ideology on the selection and outcome of telecommunications regulatory cases. Using a dataset on Federal Communications Commission orders and trials from 1990 to 1995, this paper shows that changes in the make-up of the bench of the D.C. Circuit Court...

In this paper we build upon existing literature on the evolution of the common law. We consider a model of legal evolution in which judges have varying ideologies and propensities to extend the domain of legal remedies and causes of action. Parties have symmetric stakes and are rational....

The goal of this paper is to study how litigation and settlement behavior is affected by subjects motivated by spiteful preferences -- a potentially common driver for litigation behavior. We focus on litigation and settlement behavior both under the American and the English fee-shifting rule. To...