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Testing The Selection Effect: A New Theoretical Framework With Empirical Tests, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Recent law and economics scholarship has produced much theoretical and empirical work on how and why legal disputes are settled and litigated. One of the most significant developments in this literature, attributable to the work of William Baxter and the combined efforts of George Priest and Benjamin Klein, has been the formation of a theory about both the selection of disputes for trial and the rates of success that plaintiffs enjoy for those cases that are resolved at trial. The basic theory contains two components. The selection effect refers to the proposition that the selection of tried cases is not …