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Full-Text Articles in Law
Statistics, Not Experts, Cass R. Sunstein, William Meadow
Statistics, Not Experts, Cass R. Sunstein, William Meadow
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
The legal system should rely much more than it now does on statistical evidence. It should be cautious about the judgments of experts, who make predictable cognitive errors. Like everyone else, experts have a tendency to blunder about risk, a point that has been shown to hold for doctors, whose predictions significantly err in the direction of optimism. We present new evidence that individual doctors' judgments about the ordinary standard of care are incorrect and excessively optimistic. We also show how this evidence bears on legal determinations of negligence, by doctors and others.
The Assault On Managed Care: Vicarious Liability, Class Actions, And The Patient's Bill Of Rights, Alan O. Sykes, Richard A. Epstein
The Assault On Managed Care: Vicarious Liability, Class Actions, And The Patient's Bill Of Rights, Alan O. Sykes, Richard A. Epstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Conjunction And Aggregation, Saul Levmore
Conjunction And Aggregation, Saul Levmore
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
This Article begins with the puzzle of why law does not embrace the "product rule"; a mathematically-inclined judge or jury that thought a defendant .6 likely to have been negligent and .7 likely to have caused plaintiff's harm might conclude that plaintiff had failed to satisfy the preponderance of the evidence standard. Following some discussion of a number of reactions to this puzzle, the Article advances the idea that the process of aggregating multiple jurors' assessments overlooks valuable information. First, following the Condorcet Jury Theorem, agreement among jurors might raise our level of confidence beyond what the jurors themselves report. …
Copyright, Borrowed Images, And Appropriation Art: An Economic Approach, William M. Landes
Copyright, Borrowed Images, And Appropriation Art: An Economic Approach, William M. Landes
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Puzzling Stock Options And Compensation Norms, Saul Levmore
Puzzling Stock Options And Compensation Norms, Saul Levmore
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Why do so many executives and other employees receive fixed stock options as part of their compensation packages? There is an impressive literature on compensatory options, and yet it raises more puzzles than it solves. Tax law, option theory, and agency theory all suggest that we might have expected to find quite different practices than we do observe. In particular, there is a puzzle in the popularity of conventional fixed options when indexed options would seem to be relatively attractive. The solution or story offered here develops arguments about signaling, in the form of employees' disinclination to be seen as …
Strategic Disclosure In The Patent System, Douglas Gary Lichtman, Scott Baker, Kate Kraus
Strategic Disclosure In The Patent System, Douglas Gary Lichtman, Scott Baker, Kate Kraus
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Patent applications are evaluated in light of the prior art. What this means is that patent examiners evaluate a claimed invention by comparing it with what in a rough sense corresponds to the set of ideas and inventions already known to the public. This is done for three reasons. First, the comparison helps to ensure that patents issue only in cases where an inventor has made a non-trivial contribution to the public’s store of knowledge. Second, it protects a possible reliance interest on the part of the public since, once an invention is widely known, members of the public might …
The Dormant Commerce Clause And The Internet, Jack L. Goldsmith, Alan O. Sykes
The Dormant Commerce Clause And The Internet, Jack L. Goldsmith, Alan O. Sykes
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Antitrust In The New Economy, Richard A. Posner
Antitrust In The New Economy, Richard A. Posner
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Concern has been expressed recently that U.S. antitrust law may not be well suited to regulating the "new economy." Doctrines developed to deal with competition and monopoly in smokestack industries is not well adapted, it is argued, to dealing with the dynamic economy of the twenty-first century. What I shall argue is that there is indeed a problem with the application of antitrust law to the new economy, but that it is not a doctrinal problem; antitrust doctrine is supple enough, and its commitment to economic rationality strong enough, to take in stride the competitive issues presented by the new …
Moral And Legal Rhetoric In International Relations: A Rational Choice Perspective, Eric A. Posner, Jack L. Goldsmith
Moral And Legal Rhetoric In International Relations: A Rational Choice Perspective, Eric A. Posner, Jack L. Goldsmith
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Critics of realist and rational choice approaches to international law argue that if nations were motivated entirely by power or self-interest, their leaders would not make moral and legal arguments because no one would believe them. Thus, the prevalence of moral and legal rhetoric on the international stage refutes the behavioral assumptions of realism and rational choice. This paper argues that even if nations are not motivated by a desire to comply with morality or law, the use of moral and legal arguments could occur in equilibrium. Signaling and cheap talk models show that nations may engage in talk in …
What Has Modern Literary Theory To Offer Law? (Reviewing Guyora Binder & Robert Weisberg, Literary Criticisms Of Law (2000)), Richard A. Posner
What Has Modern Literary Theory To Offer Law? (Reviewing Guyora Binder & Robert Weisberg, Literary Criticisms Of Law (2000)), Richard A. Posner
Articles
No abstract provided.
Cost-Benefit Default Principles, Cass R. Sunstein
Cost-Benefit Default Principles, Cass R. Sunstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
In an important but thus far unnoticed development, federal courts have created a new series of "default principles" for statutory interpretation, authorizing regulatory agencies, when statutes are unclear, (a) to exempt trivial risks from regulation and thus to develop a kind of common law of "acceptable risks," (b) to take account of substitute risks created by regulation, and thus to engage in "health-health" tradeoffs, (c) to consider whether compliance with regulation is feasible, (d) to take costs into account, and (e) to engage in cost-benefit balancing, and thus to develop a kind of common law of cost-benefit analysis. These cost-benefit …
Law And The Emotions, Eric A. Posner
Law And The Emotions, Eric A. Posner
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Title Page, Cjil Editors
In Memoriam: Edward H. Levi (1912-2000), Hugo F. Sonnenschein, Bernard D. Meltzer, Gerald R. Ford, Katharine Graham, Antonin Scalia
In Memoriam: Edward H. Levi (1912-2000), Hugo F. Sonnenschein, Bernard D. Meltzer, Gerald R. Ford, Katharine Graham, Antonin Scalia
University of Chicago Law Review
No abstract provided.
Table Of Contents, Cjil Editors
Table Of Contents, Cjil Editors
Chicago Journal of International Law
No abstract provided.
International Governance And American Democracy, Paul B. Stephan
International Governance And American Democracy, Paul B. Stephan
Chicago Journal of International Law
Does international governance threaten to crowd out American democracy? Many public figures and scholars think so. The street theater in Seattle last fall and Senator Dole's effort to establish a national tribunal to review World Trade Organization ("WTO") dispute resolution decisions both attest to the extent of the concern. As international institutions burgeon in number and significance, the residuum of authority left in our national government seems an ever diminishing domain. Extrapolating into the future, one can envision a time when the United States retains only as much sovereignty as, say, the members of the European Union or the States …
International Law And The American National Interest, Michael Byers
International Law And The American National Interest, Michael Byers
Chicago Journal of International Law
There are those, John Bolton and Paul Stephan among them, who worry that international law poses something of a threat to the US national interest. They argue that the United States should disengage from international law and international institutions, that to the degree the United States involves itself in foreign affairs, it should favor unilateral over multilateral action. To others, this concern seems misplaced: what does the sole superpower have to fear from international law? Moreover, the response continues, even if international law is not directly beneficial to the United States, it is dearly beneficial to at least some other …
Book Notes: The Law Of Peoples By John Rawls, Harvard 1999, Victor Peterson
Book Notes: The Law Of Peoples By John Rawls, Harvard 1999, Victor Peterson
Chicago Journal of International Law
#N/A!
Book Notes: International Law And Infectious Diseases By David P. Fidler, Oxford 1999, D. Daniel Skokol
Book Notes: International Law And Infectious Diseases By David P. Fidler, Oxford 1999, D. Daniel Skokol
Chicago Journal of International Law
#N/A!
Book Note:The Future Of International Human Rights: Commemorating The 50th Anniversary Of The Universal Declarations Of Human Rights, Burns H. Weston And Stephen P. Marks, Editors, Transnational Press 1999, Andrew Cohen
Chicago Journal of International Law
#N/A!
Masthead, Cjil Editors
Foreword, Cjil Editors
Cost-Benefit Analysis And Relative Position, Cass R. Sunstein, Robert H. Frank
Cost-Benefit Analysis And Relative Position, Cass R. Sunstein, Robert H. Frank
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Harmless Error, Richard A. Posner, William M. Landes
Harmless Error, Richard A. Posner, William M. Landes
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
This paper presents an economic model of the harmful error rule in criminal appeals. We test the implications of the model against legal doctrines governing reversible and nonreversible error of criminal convictions and on a sample of more than 1000 criminal defendants who appealed their convictions in the U.S. courts of appeals between 1996 and 1998. Among the more important theoretical and empirical findings of the paper are the following. Intentional prosecutor and judge errors are more likely to be found harmful and lead the appellate court to reverse the defendant’s conviction than are inadvertent errors. Prosecutor errors are more …
Human Behavior And The Law Of Work, Cass R. Sunstein
Human Behavior And The Law Of Work, Cass R. Sunstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
The most fundamental issues in labor and employment law involve the choice among three alternatives: waivable employers' rights, waivable employees' rights, and nonwaivable employees' rights. By combining standard contract analysis with a perspective informed by behavioral economics, it is possible to obtain a much better understanding of the underlying issues. Contrary to the conventional view: workers are especially averse to losses, and not so much concerned with obtaining gains; workers often do not know about legal rules, including key rules denying them rights; workers may well suffer from excessive optimism; workers care a great deal about fairness, and are willing …
Common Law, Common Ground, And Jefferson's Principle, David A. Strauss
Common Law, Common Ground, And Jefferson's Principle, David A. Strauss
Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers
No abstract provided.
Law And Regret (Reviewing E. Allan Farnsworth, Changing Your Mind: The Law Of Regretted Decisions (1998)), Eric A. Posner
Law And Regret (Reviewing E. Allan Farnsworth, Changing Your Mind: The Law Of Regretted Decisions (1998)), Eric A. Posner
Articles
No abstract provided.
Solidarity In Consumption, Cass R. Sunstein, Edna Ullmann-Margalit
Solidarity In Consumption, Cass R. Sunstein, Edna Ullmann-Margalit
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Contrary to a common picture of relationships in a market economy, people often express communal and membership-seeking impulses via consumption choices, purchasing goods and services because other people are doing so as well. Shared identities are maintained and created in this way. Solidarity goods are goods whose value increases as the number of people enjoying them increases. Exclusivity goods are goods whose value decreases as the number of people enjoying them increases. Distinctions can be drawn among diverse value functions, capturing diverse relationships between the value of goods and the value of shared or unshared consumption. Though markets spontaneously produce …
An Economic Analysis Of Anti-Tax Avoidance Laws, David A. Weisbach
An Economic Analysis Of Anti-Tax Avoidance Laws, David A. Weisbach
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
This article analyzes the effect of tax law doctrines designed to reduce tax shelters, such as the business purpose doctrine, and the economic substance doctrine. The article analyzes these doctrines as changes to the marginal elasticity of taxable income. As these doctrines are strengthened, the elasticity of taxable income goes down (in absolute value). By reducing the marginal elasticity of taxable income, the doctrines increase the efficiency of the tax system. Because the doctrines cannot perfectly identify tax avoidance, however, they induce a distortionary response by taxpayers, who may structure shelters to avoid the doctrines. This distortionary effect reduces their …
Contest And Consent: A Legal History Of Marital Rape, Jill Elaine Hasday
Contest And Consent: A Legal History Of Marital Rape, Jill Elaine Hasday
Occasional Papers
No abstract provided.