Category Archives: Law and Economics
Ambrosino, Cedrini, Marciano and Ramello, ‘Celebrating European law and economics: three decades in a long tradition’
ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the intellectual foundations and evolution of the European Journal of Law and Economics (EJLE) over its first thirty years. We first reconstruct the European intellectual traditions underlying law and economics – Enlightenment thought, the German Historical School, ordoliberalism, and comparative institutional analysis – and their role in shaping the journal’s founding […]
Donald Kochan, ‘Litigation Without Romance: An Incentives Story’
ABSTRACT It is a romantic notion to believe that the motivations and drivers of litigation are solely grounded in the pursuit of justice, unaffected by the realities of human nature – including individuals pursuit of self-interest, incentives, interest in identifying and willingness to take advantages within systems that might lead to gains, and the temptations […]
Clayton Masterman, ‘Proportional Recovery And Incentives To Settle’
ABSTRACT Proportional recovery allows plaintiffs to recover damages prorated by some percentage proven at trial. The typical example of proportional recovery in modern tort law is the loss-of-chance doctrine, which allows medical malpractice plaintiffs to recover damages using probabilistic evidence of causation, with damages proportional to the probability of causation they can demonstrate. Advances in […]
Gabriel and Sayantani, ‘Third Generation Rent Control: Evidence from San Diego’
ABSTRACT Evidence of adverse economic impacts of rent control derives largely from older, binding local ordinances of the 1970s. In 2020, the State of California enacted a new rent control law with less binding rent caps among jurisdictions lacking stricter regulations. We use permit, transaction and rental supply data from San Diego to evaluate the […]
Matthew Sag, ‘Copyright’s Jagged Frontier’
ABSTRACT How should law respond to transformative technologies whose benefits are inseparable from their risks? This Article argues that the answer lies not in binary choices between permission and prohibition, but in what might be called zones of contingent permission: legal frameworks that allow deployment of new technologies while requiring measures to detect and prevent […]
Rizner and Krzus, ‘The AI’s Philosophy of Contract: An Empirical Study of Breach, Remedies, and Model Heterogeneity’
ABSTRACT Is a contract a moral promise to be kept or an option to perform or pay? While this question has long divided legal theorists between ‘Holmesian’ realists and promissory moralists, it now faces a new ‘legal mind’: the large language model applied to legal analysis. This Article presents a large-scale empirical study of how […]
Fabrizio Esposito, ‘On the analytical strategies for Law and Political Economy research: Structural integration and epistemic translation are better than isolationism to study the legal-economic nexus’
ABSTRACT This article distinguishes isolationist and integrationist accounts of the legal-economic nexus. Isolationists deny the possibility of integrating different theoretical perspectives, while integrationists try to unify different accounts. Leading legal theorists have recently presented isolationist efficiency-, liberty-, and democracy-centred accounts of the market. It is argued that the legal–economic nexus is an integrationist concept, requiring […]
Schuster and Holden, ‘Superfluous Copyright and The Norm of Authenticity: An Empirical Study’
ABSTRACT Baseball cards sit at the intersection of culture, copyright law, and economics. When vintage sets entered the public domain in the 1980s, reprints emerged as potential market substitutes. Standard theory suggests that substitution should lower prices of originals, but collectibles defy this logic due to the Norm of Authenticity – a phenomenon whereby collectors […]
Yunsieg Kim, ‘Incognito Consumer Harm’
ABSTRACT What good is a legal system built for visible injuries in a world where injury is designed to be invisible? This Article identifies and theorizes incognito consumer harm: consumer-facing wrongdoing designed to remain unnoticed by most victims. A robot vacuum cleaner covertly records video inside consumers’ homes. A seemingly helpful browser extension records everything […]
Cass Sunstein, ‘Five Objections to Commodification’
ABSTRACT In free markets, countless goods may be bought and sold. What was once not traded on markets-for example, access to public parks or sexual and reproductive capacities might be turned into a commodity. Time and again, allowing things to be bought and sold increases both autonomy and welfare. Still, there are pervasive objections to […]