The Economy of Litigation (original) (raw)

Economic Methods for Lawyers (revised and extended English edition of Ökonomische Methoden im Recht)

Cheltenham, Edgar Elgar Publishing, 2015

Responding to the growing importance of economic reasoning in legal scholarship, this innovative work provides an essential introduction to the economic tools which can usefully be employed in legal reasoning. It is geared specifically towards those without a great deal of exposure to economic thinking and provides law students, legal scholars and practitioners with a practical toolbox to shape their writing, understanding and case preparation. The book’s clear focus on economic methods poses a refreshing change to conventional textbooks in this area, which tend to focus on content-related theories. Recognising that it is often difficult to derive adequate conclusions for legal arguments without first understanding the methodological limitations of economic studies, this book provides a comprehensive coverage of the most important economic concepts in order to bridge this gap. These include: • game theory • public choice and social choice theory • behavioural economics • empirical research design • basic statistics. Owing to its concise and accessible style, Economic Methods for Lawyers will provide an invaluable companion for legal scholars or practitioners who wish to utilise economic methods for developing legal argument.

The Tragedy of the Judiciary: An Inquiry into the Economic Nature of Law and Courts

The Tragedy of the Judiciary: An Inquiry into the Economic Nature of Law and Courts, 2019

This Article explores the economic nature of law and courts as an explanation for the world's endemic court congestion problem. The economic theory of goods and services is used to demonstrate that law has a dual nature-coercion and compliance-and that law as coercion is actually a club good that requires a complementary good to be useful, courts. But because courts are private goods in nature, the bundled product will behave as a private good. However, the unrestricted implementation of access-to-justice policies with the objective of increasing the people's access to courts will transform the bundled product into a common pool resource. The counterintuitive result of this transformation is that granting unrestricted access to justice might actually prevent people from accessing their rights-the tragedy of the judiciary. Two policy implications are explored: The importance of legal certainty for the tragedy mitigation, and the potentially adverse selection problem resulting from court congestion.