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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Decline Of The International Court Of Justice, Eric A. Posner
The Decline Of The International Court Of Justice, Eric A. Posner
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
The International Court of Justice is the judicial organ of the United Nations and the preeminent international court, but its caseload is light and has declined over the long term relative to the number of states. This paper examines evidence of the ICJ’s decline, and analyzes two possible theories for this decline. The first is that states stopped using the ICJ because the judges did not apply the law impartially but favored the interests of their home states. The second is that the ICJ has been the victim of conflicting interests among the states that use and control it.
A Social Networks Theory Of Privacy, Lior Strahilevitz
A Social Networks Theory Of Privacy, Lior Strahilevitz
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
How The Law Responds To Self-Help, Douglas Gary Lichtman
How The Law Responds To Self-Help, Douglas Gary Lichtman
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Is The International Court Of Justice Biased?, Eric A. Posner, Miguel F. P. De Figueiredo
Is The International Court Of Justice Biased?, Eric A. Posner, Miguel F. P. De Figueiredo
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
The International Court of Justice has jurisdiction over disputes between nations, and has decided dozens of cases since it began operations in 1946. Its defenders argue that the ICJ decides cases impartially and confers legitimacy on the international legal system. Its critics argue that the members of the ICJ vote the interests of the states that appoint them. Prior empirical scholarship is ambiguous. We test the charge of bias using statistical methods. We find strong evidence that (1) judges favor the states that appoint them, and (2) judges favor states whose wealth level is close to that of the judges' …
Minimalism At War, Cass R. Sunstein
Minimalism At War, Cass R. Sunstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
The Law And Economics Of Contract Interpretation, Richard A. Posner
The Law And Economics Of Contract Interpretation, Richard A. Posner
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Contract interpretation is an understudied topic in the economic analysis of contract law. This paper combines simple formal analysis of the tradeoffs involved in interpretation with applications to the principal doctrines of contract interpretation, including the "four corners" rule, mutual mistake, contra proferentum, and what I call the (informal but very important) rule of "extrinsic nonevidence." Gap filling is distinguished, and the relativity of interpretive doctrine to the interpretive medium—jurors, arbitrators, and judges in different kinds of judicial system—is emphasized.
Cordell Hull, The Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act, And The Wto, Kenneth W. Dam
Cordell Hull, The Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act, And The Wto, Kenneth W. Dam
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Cost-Benefit Analysis And The Environment, Cass R. Sunstein
Cost-Benefit Analysis And The Environment, Cass R. Sunstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
This review-essay explores the uses and limits of cost-benefit analysis in the context of environmental protection, focusing on three recent books: Priceless, by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling; Cellular Phones, Public Fears, and A Culture of Precaution, by Adam Burgess; and Catastrophe: Risk and Response, by Richard A. Posner. The review-essay emphasizes three principal limitations on the use of cost-benefit analysis. First, it is important to distinguish between the easy cases for cost-benefit analysis, in which the beneficiaries of regulation pay all or almost all of its cost, from the harder cases, in which the beneficiaries pay little for the …
Unbundling Scope-Of-Permission Goods: When Should We Invest In Reducing Entry Barriers?, Randal C. Picker
Unbundling Scope-Of-Permission Goods: When Should We Invest In Reducing Entry Barriers?, Randal C. Picker
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Cyber Security: Of Heterogeneity And Autarky, Randal C. Picker
Cyber Security: Of Heterogeneity And Autarky, Randal C. Picker
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Debiasing Through Law, Cass R. Sunstein, Christine Jolls
Debiasing Through Law, Cass R. Sunstein, Christine Jolls
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Human beings are often boundedly rational. In the face of bounded rationality, the legal system might attempt either to "debias law," by insulating legal outcomes from the effects of boundedly rational behavior, or instead to "debias through law," by steering legal actors in more rational directions. Legal analysts have focused most heavily on insulating outcomes from the effects of bounded rationality. In fact, however, a large number of actual and imaginable legal strategies are efforts to engage in debiasing through law – to help people reduce or even eliminate boundedly rational behavior. In important contexts, these efforts promise to avoid …
Corporate Heroin: A Defense Of Perks, James C. Spindler, M. Todd Henderson
Corporate Heroin: A Defense Of Perks, James C. Spindler, M. Todd Henderson
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
We argue that firms undertake to reduce employee savings in order to avoid final period problems that occur when employees accumulate enough wealth to retire and leave the industry. Normally, reputation constrains employee behavior, since an employee who "cheats" at one firm will then find herself unable to get a job at another. However, employees who have saved such that they no longer care about continued employment will act opportunistically in the final periods of employment, which can destroy much or all of the surplus otherwise created by the employment relationship. We believe that this sort of final period cheating …
Dollars And Death, Cass R. Sunstein, Eric A. Posner
Dollars And Death, Cass R. Sunstein, Eric A. Posner
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Administrative regulations and tort law both impose controls on activities that cause mortality risks, but they do so in puzzlingly different ways. Under a relatively new and still-controversial procedure, administrative regulations rely on a fixed value of a statistical life representing the hedonic loss from death. Under much older law, tort law in most states excludes hedonic loss from the calculation of damages, and instead focuses on loss of income, which regulatory policy ignores. Regulatory policy also disregards losses to dependents; tort law usually allows dependents to recover for loss of support. Regulatory policy generally treats the loss of the …
Group Judgments: Deliberation, Statistical Means, And Information Markets, Cass R. Sunstein
Group Judgments: Deliberation, Statistical Means, And Information Markets, Cass R. Sunstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
How can groups elicit and aggregate the information held by their individual members? There are three possibilities. Groups might use the statistical mean of individual judgments; they might encourage deliberation; or they might use information markets. In both private and public institutions, deliberation is the standard way of proceeding; but for two reasons, deliberating groups often fail to make good decisions. First, the statements and acts of some group members convey relevant information, and that information often leads other people not to disclose what they know. Second, social pressures, imposed by some group members, often lead other group members to …
Precautions Against What? The Availability Heuristic And Cross-Cultural Risk Perceptions, Cass R. Sunstein
Precautions Against What? The Availability Heuristic And Cross-Cultural Risk Perceptions, Cass R. Sunstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Because risks are all on sides of social situations, it is not possible to be globally "precautionary." Hence the Precautionary Principle runs into serious conceptual difficulties; any precautions will themselves create hazards of one or another kind. When the principle gives guidance, it is often because of the availability heuristic, which can make some risks stand out as particularly salient, whatever their actual magnitude. The same heuristic helps to explain differences across groups, cultures, and even nations in the perception of risks, especially when linked with such social processes as cascades and group polarization. One difficulty here is that what …
The Economics Of Public International Law, Alan O. Sykes
The Economics Of Public International Law, Alan O. Sykes
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
This paper is a preliminary draft for eventual inclusion in the Handbook of Law and Economics, A. Mitchell Polinsky & Steven Shavell editors. It reviews and synthesizes the work of economists and law and economics scholars in the field of public international law. The bulk of that work has been in the area of international trade, but many of the ideas in the trade literature have implications for other subfields. Recent years have seen a significant increase in research on other topics as well. The paper begins with a general framework for thinking about the positive and normative economics of …
Company Stock, Market Rationality, And Legal Reform, Stephen P. Utkus, Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, Shlomo Benartzi
Company Stock, Market Rationality, And Legal Reform, Stephen P. Utkus, Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, Shlomo Benartzi
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Some eleven million 401(k) plan participants take a concentrated equity position in their retirement savings account, investing more than 20% of the balance in their employer's common stock. Yet investing in the stock of one’s employer is a risky investment on two counts: single securities are riskier than diversified portfolios (such as mutual funds), and the employee's human capital is typically positively correlated with the performance of the company. In the worst-case scenario, illustrated by the Enron bankruptcy, workers can lose their jobs and much of their retirement wealth simultaneously. For workers who expect to work for the company for …
Conflict Or Credibility: Analyst Conflicts Of Interest And The Market For Underwriting Business, James C. Spindler
Conflict Or Credibility: Analyst Conflicts Of Interest And The Market For Underwriting Business, James C. Spindler
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
This paper argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, conflicts of interest among equities research analysts (i.e., where investment banks would offer positive analyst research in quid pro quos for underwriting business) were beneficial to the capital markets. First, conflicted analyst research credibly signaled positive inside information that is otherwise too costly to communicate under 1933 Act liability, correcting adverse-selection problems. Second, conflicted analyst research mitigated agency costs between issuer and underwriter by allowing the underwriter to credibly commit to seek a higher offering price than the underwriter would prefer. Third, analyst research quid pro quos took the form of a …
Holding Internet Service Providers Accountable, Douglas Gary Lichtman, Eric A. Posner
Holding Internet Service Providers Accountable, Douglas Gary Lichtman, Eric A. Posner
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Internet service providers are today largely immune from liability for their role in the creation and propagation of worms, viruses, and other forms of malicious computer code. In this Essay, we question that state of affairs. Our purpose is not to weigh in on the details—for example, whether liability should sound in negligence or strict liability, or whether liability is in this instance best implemented by statute or via gradual common law development. Rather, our aim is to challenge the recent trend in the courts and Congress away from liability and toward complete immunity for Internet service providers. In our …
The Persistent Puzzles Of Safeguards: Lessons From The Steel Dispute, Alan O. Sykes
The Persistent Puzzles Of Safeguards: Lessons From The Steel Dispute, Alan O. Sykes
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
The recent WTO dispute between the United States and eight complainant nations over protective measures for the steel industry brought widespread attention to a little known area of WTO law—the rules governing "safeguard measures," the temporary protection of troubled industries against import surges. The use of safeguard measures is normatively controversial, although their welfare implications are much less clear than their critics sometimes suggest. This paper makes the point that WTO rules, as interpreted by recent Appellate Body decisions and applied by the dispute panel in the steel case, pose nearly insurmountable hurdles to the legal use of safeguard measures …
Specialization, Firms, And Markets: The Division Of Labor Within And Between Law Firms, Thomas N. Hubbard, Luis Garicano
Specialization, Firms, And Markets: The Division Of Labor Within And Between Law Firms, Thomas N. Hubbard, Luis Garicano
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labor? This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We find that firms' field scope narrows as market size increases and individuals specialize, indicating that firms' boundaries reflect organizational trade-offs. Moreover, we find that whether the division of labor is mediated by firms differs systematically according to whether lawyers in a particular field are mainly involved in structuring transactions or in dispute resolution. We then analyze which types of specialists tend to work in the same firm and which tend …
The Optimal Complexity Of Legal Rules, Richard A. Epstein
The Optimal Complexity Of Legal Rules, Richard A. Epstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Legal systems must deal not only with the cognitive limitations of ordinary individuals, but must also seek to curb the excesses of individual self-interest without conferring excessive powers on state individuals whose motives and cognitive powers are themselves not above question. Much modern law sees administrative expertise as the solution to these problems. But in fact the traditional and simpler rules of thumb that dominated natural law thinking often do a better job in overcoming these cognitive and motivational weaknesses. The optimal strategy involves the fragmentation of government power, and the limitation of public discretion. Three types of rules that …
Hierarchies, Specialization, And The Utilization Of Knowledge: Theory And Evidence From The Legal Services Industry, Thomas N. Hubbard, Luis Garicano
Hierarchies, Specialization, And The Utilization Of Knowledge: Theory And Evidence From The Legal Services Industry, Thomas N. Hubbard, Luis Garicano
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
What role do hierarchies play with respect to the organization of production and what determines their structure? We develop an equilibrium model of hierarchical organization, then provide empirical evidence using confidential data on thousands of law offices from the 1992 Census of Services. The driving force in the model is increasing returns in the utilization of acquired knowledge. We show how the equilibrium assignment of individuals to hierarchical positions varies with the degree to which their human capital is field-specialized, then show how this equilibrium changes with the extent of the market. We find empirical evidence consistent with a central …
Liberty Versus Property? Cracks In The Foundations Of Copyright Law, Richard A. Epstein
Liberty Versus Property? Cracks In The Foundations Of Copyright Law, Richard A. Epstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Many modern intellectual property scholars have argued that the creation of patents and copyrights, for inventions and writings, respectively, should be resisted on the ground that these forms of property necessarily infringe ordinary forms of liberty, in contrast to property that is found in tangible things. This article rejects that claim by showing how property conflicts with liberty in both settings, but that the different configurations of rights observed in these various areas is defensible on the ground that the loss of liberty for all persons is, to the extent that human institutions can make it, compensated by the increased …
Optimal War And Jus Ad Bellum, Alan O. Sykes, Eric A. Posner
Optimal War And Jus Ad Bellum, Alan O. Sykes, Eric A. Posner
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
The laws of war forbid states to use force against each other except in self-defense or with the authorization of the United Nations Security Council. Self-defense is usually understood to mean self-defense against an imminent threat. We model the decision of states to use force against "rogue" states, and argue that under certain conditions it may be proper to expand the self-defense exception to preemptive self-defense. We also consider related issues such as humanitarian intervention, collective security, and the role of the Security Council.
Disparities And Discrimination In Health Care Coverage: A Critique Of The Institute Of Medicine Study, Richard A. Epstein
Disparities And Discrimination In Health Care Coverage: A Critique Of The Institute Of Medicine Study, Richard A. Epstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
Navigating The Anticommons For Pharmaceutical Patents: Steady The Course On Hatch-Waxman, Bruce N. Kuhlik, Richard A. Epstein
Navigating The Anticommons For Pharmaceutical Patents: Steady The Course On Hatch-Waxman, Bruce N. Kuhlik, Richard A. Epstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
No abstract provided.
A Theory Of International Adjudication, John C. Yoo, Eric A. Posner
A Theory Of International Adjudication, John C. Yoo, Eric A. Posner
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Some international tribunals, such as the Iran-U.S. claims tribunal and the trade dispute panels set up under GATT, are "dependent" in the sense that the judges are appointed by the state parties for the purpose of resolving a particular dispute. If the judges do not please the state parties, they will not be used again. Other international tribunals, such as the International Court of Justice, the Inter- American Court of Human Rights, and the new International Criminal Court, are "independent" in the sense that the judges are appointed in advance of any particular dispute and serve fixed terms. The conventional …
Are Poor People Worth Less Than Rich People? Disaggregating The Value Of Statistical Lives, Cass R. Sunstein
Are Poor People Worth Less Than Rich People? Disaggregating The Value Of Statistical Lives, Cass R. Sunstein
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
Each government agency uses a uniform figure to measure the value of a statistical life. This is a serious mistake. The very theory that underlies current practice calls for far more individuation of the relevant values. According to that theory, the value of statistical lives should vary across risks. More controversially, the value of a statistical life should vary across individuals—even or especially if the result would be to produce a lower number for some people than for others. One practical implication is that a higher value should be given to programs that reduce cancer risks. Should government use a …
The (Non)Taxation Of Risk, David A. Weisbach
The (Non)Taxation Of Risk, David A. Weisbach
Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics
A long line of literature argues that income taxes do not tax the return to risk bearing. The conclusion, if correct, has important implications for the choice between an income tax and a consumption tax and for the design of income taxes. The literature, however, on its face seems unrealistic because it models only very simplified tax systems, assumes perfect rationality by individuals, and requires the government to take complex positions in securities markets to hold in equilibrium. This paper examines the extent to which these problems affect the conclusions we draw from the literature. It argues that the criticisms …