Law and Economics Commons^™

Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?, Anu Bradford, Yun-Chien Chang, Adam S. Chilton, Nuno Garoupa

Faculty Scholarship

There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country – that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law – profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly …

Comparative Antitrust Federalism: Review Of Cengiz, Antitrust Federalism In The Eu And The Us, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This brief essay reviews Firat Cengiz’s book Antitrust Federalism in the EU and the US (2012), which compares the role of federalism in the competition law of the European Union and the United States. Both of these systems are “federal,” of course, because both have individual nation-states (Europe) or states (US) with their own individual competition provisions, but also an overarching competition law that applies to the entire group. This requires a certain amount of cooperation with respect to both territorial reach and substantive coverage.

Cengiz distinguishes among “markets,” “hierarchies,” and “networks” as forms of federalism. Markets are the least …

The Role Of Efficiency Justifications In U.S.-American And West German Merger Control Law: A Comparison, Christian Westerhausen

LLM Theses and Essays

When merger control laws first emerged in the United States and West Germany in the early 1900s, some businessmen and economists argued that the efficiency of businesses was impeded by antimerger laws. They contended that only very large businesses could realize significant efficiencies, be internationally competitive, and attain technological progress. This paper analyzes the role that these efficiency arguments had on the laws in West Germany and the United States, respectively. German law mainly upheld the idea that preservation of competition was most important for business efficiency, but also included a provision that firms could put forward the social desirability …