Category Archives: Law and Economics
Boilerplate Symposium VII: Oren Bar-Gill on Consent Without Reading
“This is the seventh in a series of posts reviewing Margaret Radin’s Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights and the Rule of Law. Oren Bar-Gill is a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law, Economics and Organization, New York University School of Law. Professor Radin’s book is an eloquent and powerful critique [...]
Ayres and Schwartz, ‘The No Reading Problem in Consumer Contract Law’
Abstract: Instead of attempting to promote informed consumer assent through quixotic attempts to have consumers read ever-expanding disclosures, this Article argues that consumer protection law should focus on unexpected, unfavorable terms. We propose a system under which mass market sellers are required periodically to engage in a process of “term substantiation” through which sellers would [...]
Eugenio Battesini, ‘Comparative Tort Law and Economics: Strict Liability in Brazilian Legal Practice’
Abstract: Law and economics has been received skeptically outside of the United States. Attributing this phenomenon to the “legal parochialism,” Nuno Garoupa suggests that the change in such a framework requires the development of academic works that use comparative methodology and that perform the integration of law and economics to local legal doctrines. Tort law [...]
Christopher Yoo, ‘Beyond Coase: Emerging Technologies and Property Theory’
Abstract: In addition to prompting the development of the Coase Theorem, Ronald Coase’s landmark 1959 article on The Federal Communications Commission touched off a revolution in spectrum policy. Although one of Coase’s proposed reforms (that spectrum should be allocated through markets) has now become the conventional wisdom, his other principal recommendation (that governments stop dedicating [...]
Jennifer Arlen, ‘Economic Analysis of Medical Malpractice Liability and Its Reform’
Abstract: This Chapter provides an economic analysis of medical error employing a model in which physicians who provide suboptimal medical care may have done so knowingly (as in the traditional model) or accidentally. Accidental medical error is a leading cause of medical negligence: many if not most physicians who provided suboptimal care did not know [...]
Lee Anne Fennell, ‘The Problem of Resource Access’
Abstract: The Coasean insight that transaction costs stand between the world as we know it and an ideal of perfect efficiency has provided generations of law and economics scholars with an analytic North Star. But for legal scholars interested in the efficiency implications of property arrangements, transaction costs turn out to constitute an unhelpful category. [...]
Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, ‘The Economic Perspective: Demand and Supply in the Reduction of Transaction Costs in the Ancient World’
Abstract: In this chapter, I distill some elements of the demand and supply of institutions designed to reduce transaction costs in the ancient world. I some cases, contractual parties could reduce transaction cost by accurately designing contracts. In other cases, the failure of private coordination placed the state in a better position than private parties [...]
Ayotte and Hansmann, ‘Legal Entities as Transferable Bundles of Contracts’
Abstract: The large, modern business corporation is frequently organized as a complex cluster of hundreds of corporate subsidiaries under the common control of a single corporate parent. Our Article provides new theory and supportive evidence to help explain this structure. We focus, in particular, on the advantages of subsidiary entities in providing the option to [...]
Michael Rustad, ‘Twenty-First-Century Tort Theories: The Internalist/Externalist Debate’
Abstract: Each year the current chair of the Section on Torts and Compensation Systems has the privilege of proposing the topic for the section’s panel at the annual meetings. I organized an authors-meet-critics American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting panel highlighting the work of John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky because they have established [...]
Paula Monopoli, ‘Succession Law through an Economics Lens’
“Kelly, Daniel B., Toward Economic Analysis of the Uniform Probate Code, 45 Univ. of Mich. J. of Law Reform 855 (2012), available at SSRN. In his article, Toward Economic Analysis of the Uniform Probate Code, Dan Kelly fills a significant gap in the inheritance law literature. As he notes, a number of scholars have brought [...]
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