As is the case for many of our entitlements, our rights of action are protected by a less-than-full property rule. As a result, financing of litigation has been limited. The recent rise of alternate dispute financing has raised serious ethical problems. In this Article, I discuss those problems,...

The metaverse is the emerging cyberspace realm were people and entities (and various forms of algorithms and artificial intelligence) will interact, engage in games, sports, and entertainment, buy and sell “real world” and “in the metaverse” goods and services, and otherwise get into...

We study the role of attorneys as arbitrators in securities arbitration, using a dataset of 422 randomly selected arbitrators and their 6724 arbitration awards from 1992 to 2006. We find that arbitrators who also represent brokerage firms or brokers in other arbitrations award significantly less...

Plaintiffs’ lawyers in the United States play a key role in combating corporate fraud. Shareholders who lose money as a result of fraud can file securities class actions to recover their losses, but most shareholders do not have enough money at stake to justify overseeing the cases filed on...

Following the contraction in demand for law firms' services during the Great Recession, “Big Law” was widely diagnosed as suffering from several maladies that would spell its ultimate demise, including excessive fees, excessive size, increased competition from in-house counsel, the...

The market for legal services, and particularly lawyers' Contingent Fee (CF) arrangements, have been extensively studied from legal, economic and sociological standpoints, but curiously not from a behavioral perspective. Building on Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory, this paper presents a...

To say that the rules governing lawyers do - or should - reflect a commitment to truth is a worthy goal, but it misapprehends how the professional standards should be applied. Many accuse lawyers of being liars with little devotion to the truth, while the law imposes on them a fiduciary...

Lawyers' Contingent Fee (CF) rates are rather uniform, often one-third of the recovery. Arguably, this uniformity is a type of anti-competitive price-fixing, which results in clients paying supra-competitive fees. This paper challenges this argument. It shows that uniform CF rates provide...

There is empirical evidence of a cross-country positive association between the number of lawyers per capita and the extent of litigation. For instance, Spain has more litigation and more lawyers per capita than most OECD countries. How should this association be interpreted? In this paper we...

The legal system can be treated as a large market where justice is traded in terms of legal disputes. Empirical evidence underlines that demand for legal assistance raises over time, despite high costs connected to filing, not only in Italy but also elsewhere in Europe. Moreover, the demand for...