Legal Change and the Social Value of Lawsuits

Thomas Miceli

No 2008-34, Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper integrates the literatures on the social value of lawsuits, the evolution of the law, and judicial preferences to evaluate the hypothesis that the law evolves toward efficiency. The setting is a simple accident model with costly litigation where the efficient law minimizes the sum of accident plus litigation costs. In the steady state equilibrium, the distribution of legal rules is not necessarily efficient but instead depends on a combination of selective litigation, judicial bias, and precedent.

Keywords: Efficiency of the law; judicial decision making; legal change; precedent; value of lawsuits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K40 K41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://media.economics.uconn.edu/working/2008-34.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Legal change and the social value of lawsuits (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uct:uconnp:2008-34

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics University of Connecticut 365 Fairfield Way, Unit 1063 Storrs, CT 06269-1063. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark McConnel ().