My research is focused on problems of legal design in market democracies. I am currently looking at how legal institutions learn over time, the role of lawyers in generating adaptive legal rules and the rule of law and how the markets for law, lawyers and dispute resolution affect the production of law. This involves questions not only of the price and quality of legal services but also of innovation in the provision of legal goods and services and the provision of the 'soft infrastructure' that supports innovative economic activity. I am particularly interested in thinking about how the existing regulatory structure for law inhibits innovation in law to meet the needs of the new economy and the potential for more market-based methods of providing legal inputs to support economic activity. I am also working on issues related to the democratic functions of law and the risks arising from the growth of anti-court sentiment in tort reform and alternative dispute resolution norms.
Articles
Higher Demand, Lower Supply? A Comparative Assessment of the Legal Landscape for Ordinary Americans, Fordham Urban Law Journal (2010)
In this paper I review the small amount of available data on the extent to...
The Dynamic Quality of Law: The Role of Judicial Incentives and Legal Human Capital in the Adaptation of Law, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2010)
Much of the existing literature investigating the relationship between legal regimes and economic growth focuses...
The Strategy of Methodology: The Virtues of Being Reductionist for Comparative Law, University of Toronto Law Journal (2009)
In this comment I respond to three comments by comparative legal scholars on my paper...
Framing the Choice between Cash and Courthouse: Experiences with the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, Law and Society Review (2008)
In this paper I report the results of a quantitative and qualitative empirical study of...
Legal Barriers to Innovation: The Growing Economic Cost of Professional Control Over Corporate Legal Markets, Stanford Law Review (2008)
Markets for legal goods and services are among the most heavily regulated in the U.S....
Contributions to Books
The Role of International Law Firms and Multijural Legal Human Capital in the Harmonization of Legal Regimes, Multijuralism: Manifestations, Causes and Consequences (2009)
The problem of harmonizing legal rules across multiple overlapping legal orders is, in part, a...
The Public and the Private in the Provision of Law for Global Transactions, .) Contractual Certainty in International Trade: Empirical Studies and Theoretical Debates on Institutional Support for Global Economic Exchanges (2009)
In this essay, I revisit the public/private divide in order to explore more fully the...
The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund: "An Unprecedented Experiment in American Democracy", The Future of Terrorism Risk Insurance (2005)
One of the profound ironies of September 11 is that an attack widely perceived to...
The Many Legal Institutions that Support Contractual Commitment, Handbook of New Institutional Economics (2004)
One of the fundamental contributions of transaction cost theory and institutional economics has been to...
Unpublished Papers
Law for a Flat World: Legal Infrastructure and the New Economy (2010)
In the last two decades, the economy has undergone fundamental transformation with the twin structural...