Law Commons^™

Why Do Judges Read Statutes?, Alexander Volokh

Alexander Volokh

The standard view that "statutory interpretation matters" -- that different methods can "lead to" different results -- is hard to square with the standard rational-choice account of judicial decisionmaking. Indeed, under the standard model, it is not obvious why a judge should bother to even read the statute.

I show, within the rational-choice account, how the judge can benefit from reading the statute when the preferences of legislators are uncertain. Doing so shows the judge what policy the legislators agreed to in the past, which gives him clues as to legislators' preferences today. Moreover, different assumptions about how the legislature …

Privatization And The Effectiveness Of Monitoring Agencies, Alexander Volokh

Alexander Volokh

The privatization literature depicts the choice whether to contract out as a tradeoff between excessive private investment in quality-reducing cost saving and inadequate public investment in cost-increasing quality improvement, under circumstances where neither the amount of investment nor the cost or quality outcomes are contractible. This paper shows that a monitoring regime, which can verify the benefit of the service at a cost, can bring the investment levels of the private contractor closer to the optimum, while it may not be able to improve the performance of the public sector. Monitors can be captured, and the possibility of capture may …