According to legends dating back to the Renaissance, the ermine would rather die than soil its pristine white coat. The ermine so came to symbolize purity, and English judges adopted this symbol by adorning their robes with ermine fur. For their part, American judges took a more ermine-friendly approach, dispensing… Read More »
This Article seeks to develop a theory of the best timing of legal decisions that is independent of questions about which individuals or institutions should make those decisions. In doing so, it analyzes law as a productive enterprise. Like any productive enterprise, law seeks to obtain necessary inputs at the… Read More »
Introduction
In my Note, I propose an alternative to the presidential signing statement that has been hotly debated in the literature in recent years. By re-examining an often-forgotten constitutional method for enacting laws, I conclude that when the President has certain doubts about the constitutionality of a bill Congress has… Read More »
In his 1993 Nobel Laureate lecture, the leading theorist of institutional economics, Douglass North, emphasized the relevance of his life’s work for economic development policy. Twenty years prior, in his book authored with Robert Thomas and titled The Rise of the Western World, North laid out the theoretical connection between… Read More »
Of all the questions about why the recent financial mess happened, the most troublesome have to do with why large, supposedly sophisticated financial institutions took on so much risk. There are many possible responses, some of which are about informational asymmetries, others about agency costs and moral hazards, and… Read More »
Lee Anne Fennell
When individuals and households select products, services, or endeavors, they are usually making a bundled choice that comes with a certain level of risk exposure or insurance protection built in. Buying a house? You’re also buying a hefty dose of local housing market risk, for better or… Read More »
Game theory has transformed international law scholarship. Recent accounts have harnessed alleged lessons learned from game theory in service of a new brand of realism about the field. These skeptical accounts conclude that international law loses its normative force because states that “follow” international law are simply participants in a… Read More »
Introduction
In this Editorial we focus our attention on two concerns for Law and Economics (LE). The first relates to commensurability and the second focuses on agency. Both concerns are central to LE. The first concern questions the dominant method LE uses for making substantive decisions. The second concern challenges… Read More »
Is legal theory worth talking about? Worth studying? Does it make sense to imagine legal theory as a distinctive academic endeavor? Or does legal theory always collapse, either into a different academic discipline on the one hand, or into a variety of professional discourse on the other? We believe that… Read More »
My article Funding Irrationality addresses a relatively unexamined issue in the literature of class action settlements and public settlement funds: should the people who oversee a large settlement fund account for claimants’ irrational settlement decisions?
Much of the literature related to large settlements seeks to improve how judges and private… Read More »