Category Archives: Law and Economics
Hughes and Smith, ‘Do Copyright Professors Pay Attention to Economists? How Empirical Evidence on Copyright Piracy Appears (or Not) in Law Literature’
ABSTRACT One of the great empirical questions of early 21st century intellectual property has been whether online copyright infringement causes harm to authorized sales of copyrighted works. Beginning in 2003, economists turned their attention to studying this question empirically. As of early 2022, there have been 34 empirical studies published in peer-review journals on whether […]
Henrik Lando, ‘When Should Non-performance of Contracts Be Excused Under Changed Circumstances?’
ABSTRACT Should a party to a contract be excused from fulfilling the contract if doing so has become much more burdensome due to a radical change of circumstances? Legal doctrines of impracticability, force majeure, frustration or hardship ask if the change of circumstance negated the parties’ basic assumptions or was unforeseeable. What this means is […]
Fahn and others, ‘Past and Future Developments in the Economics of Relational Contracts’
ABSTRACT This paper was written as an editorial preface to a Symposium on Relational Contracts, that was jointly edited by the three authors, and that will appear in the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE). The Symposium contains eleven contributions to the economics of relational contracts, written by many of the leading scholars in […]
Alain Marciano, ‘Economic Analysis of Law (1973): A Methodological Innovation Perceived as Ideological Endeavor’
ABSTRACT Posner’s masterpiece, Economic Analysis of Law was published in 1973. The importance of this book has largely been noted and its content scrutinized. One aspect has in particular been emphasized, it was the moment when law-and-economics became a new field or, rather, when a second and radically new form of interactions between economics and […]
Satish Kumar Jain, ‘Successive Joint Torts: Conditions for Efficiency’
ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the derivation of conditions for efficiency for liability rules for successive joint torts. In a successive joint tort, in the first instance the victim suffers harm on account of interaction with a tortfeasor, which subsequently is aggravated because of interaction with another tortfeasor. There can of course be no […]
Wolfgang Weigel, ‘A Tribute to the Master (of Law and Economics)’
ABSTRACT Richard Posner himself calls his seminal book a ‘textbook’. Reading the book, one gets the impression that the author acts very much like someone who is as eager as proud to show what he detected. The sites thus visited comprise a surprisingly large number of issues rooted in public law – which is far […]
Gilman and Wagman, ‘The Law and Economics of Privacy’
ABSTRACT Consumer welfare has been a north star of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), providing an organizing principle for diverse issues under the Commission’s dual competition and consumer protection missions and, specifically, a uniform ground on which to examine the law and economics of privacy matters and the tradeoffs that privacy policies entail. This paper […]
Nuno Garoupa, ‘The Many Lives of the Efficiency of the Common Law Hypothesis: The Case of the Mixed Law Jurisdictions’
ABSTRACT In the first edition of his influential book, Posner developed what is known as the efficiency of the common law hypothesis. Since then, legal economists proposed different explanations to why the common law generates efficient rules. From that perspective, the prevalence of mixed law jurisdictions is puzzling. We illustrate the paradox by using simple […]
Benito Arruñada, ‘The Roman Familia: A View from the Economics of Property’
ABSTRACT This chapter presents an analytical framework that draws upon the economics of personal and real rights, which helps in understanding the institutions of the Roman familia. The discussion proceeds in four stages. First, it outlines the central tenets of the theory, which regards the formalization of transactions as a critical, secondary, public ‘contractual’ step […]
Ella Corren, ‘The Consent Burden in Consumer and Digital Markets’
ABSTRACT Consent has become central to the governance of consumer markets in general and digital markets in particular. But consumer consent is arguably empty, and it enables and legitimizes digital surveillance and other consumer exploitations. This Article argues that traditional law-and-economics views on consent hide a crucial aspect: consent shifts considerable burdens – to collect […]