This accessible volume integrates wide-ranging economic methodologies with a vast array of legal subjects. Coverage includes the first-year law school curriculum along with institutions and doctrines comprising the core foundation of upper level legal study. Dedicated chapters introduce neoclassical economics, interest group theory, social choice, and game theory, and the book intersperses alternative methodological insights. The analysis synthesizes these methodologies with modern and classic case law, other legal materials, and policy discussions inspired by current events. Ideal for a law school seminar or capstone course, this unique volume is also perfectly suited for business school courses on legal methods and public policy. Professors will find a rich array of materials adaptable to varying pedagogical styles and substantive areas of emphasis. Students exploring these materials will emerge with a deeper understanding of law and economics and a greater appreciation of our lawmaking institutions.

Legal reasoning, pronouncements of judgment, the design and implementation of statutes, and even constitution-making and discourse all depend on timing. This compelling study examines the diverse interactions between law and time, and provides important perspectives on how law's architecture can be understood through time. The book revisits older work on legal transitions and breaks new ground on timing rules, especially with respect to how judges, legislators and regulators use time as a tool when devising new rules. At its core, The Timing of Lawmaking goes directly to the heart of the most basic of legal debates: when should we respect the past, and when should we make a clean break for the future?

This book examines the foundations of international standard-setting from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Offers a comprehensive theory on the risks and benefits of incorporating economic theory in capital markets and corporate lawmaking.

By accessibly recounting and analyzing the unique experience of institutions in colonial Indiawhich were influenced heavily by both British Common Law and indigenous Indian practices and traditionsLaw and the Economy in Colonial India sheds new light on what exactly fosters the types of institutions that have been key to economic development throughout world history more generally. The culmination and years of research, the book goes through a range of examples, including textiles, opium, tea, indigo, tenancy, credit, and land mortgage, to show how economic laws in colonial India were shaped neither by imported European ideas about how colonies should be ruled nor indigenous institutions, but by the practice of producing and trading. The book is an essential addition to Indian history and to some of the most fundamental questions in economic history."

Should laws be made in courts or in parliaments? Orlin Yalnazov proposes a new approach to the problem. He conceptualizes law as an information product, and law-making as an exercise in production. Law-making has inputs and outputs, and technology is used to transform one into the other. Law may, depending on input and technology, take on different forms: it can be vague or it can be certain. The ‘technologies’ between which we may choose are precedent and statute. Differences between the two being sizeable, our choice has significant repercussions for the cost of the input and the form of the output. The author applies this framework to several problems, including the comparison between the common and the civil law, comparative civil procedure, and EU law. Perhaps most critically, he offers a critique of the ‘efficiency of the common law’ hypothesis.

"The Economics of Lawmaking explores the relative advantages and limits of alternative sources of law. Francesco Parisi and Vincy Fon explore the process of legal rule production while considering issues of institutional design from a law and economics point of view." "The authors provide a comprehensive overview of the four fundamental sources of law: legislation, judge-made law. customary law, and international law. The defining features of these four sources are then dissected and closely examined using economic analysts and public choice theory. Each part includes an introduction into the lawmaking process for each source, and goes on to discuss such other issues as the optimal specificity of law in legislation to the theories of legal precedent, and to changes in customary lawmaking."--BOOK JACKET.

"Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else. In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital - and lawyers are the keepers of the code. Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients' needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations--assets that exist only in law. A powerful new way of thinking about one of the most pernicious problems of our time, The Code of Capital explores the different ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are coded to give financial advantage to their holders. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it."--Provided by publisher.

Exchange of goods and ideas among nations, cross-border pollution, global warming, and international crime pose formidable questions for international law. Two respected scholars provide an intellectual framework for assessing these problems from a rational choice perspective and describe conditions under which international law succeeds or fails.

In a concise, compelling argument, one of the founders and most influential advocates of the law and economics movement divides the subject into two separate areas, which he identifies with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The first, Benthamite, strain, “economic analysis of law,” examines the legal system in the light of economic theory and shows how economics might render law more effective. The second strain, law and economics, gives equal status to law, and explores how the more realistic, less theoretical discipline of law can lead to improvements in economic theory. It is the latter approach that Judge Calabresi advocates, in a series of eloquent, thoughtful essays that will appeal to students and scholars alike.