Full Description
This book empirically explores whether and under what conditions the judicial process is efficient. Three specific issues are addressed: first, disputants self-select into litigation. Do they tend to bring cases with merit? Second, filed cases differ in their social import. Do courts select more important cases to devote more resource to? Third, courts establish precedents, affect resource allocation in the cases at hand, and influence future behaviours of transacting parties. Do courts, like Judge Posner asserts, tend to make decisions that enhance allocative efficiency and reduce transaction costs? Positive answers to the above questions attest to the efficiency of the judicial process. What drive efficient or inefficient outcomes are the selections and decisions by litigants, litigators, and judges. Their earlier selections and decisions affect later ones. Eleven chapters in this book, authored by leading empirical legal scholars in the world, deal with these issues in the US, Europe, and Asia.
Contents
Introduction Yun-chien Chang; 1. Do patent law suits target invalid patents? Michael Frakes and Melissa Wassermann; 2. Platform procedure: using technology to facilitate (efficient) civil settlement J. J. Prescott and Alexander Sanchez; 3. Speedy adjudication in hard cases and low settlement rates in easy cases: an empirical analysis of Taiwan courts with comparison to US federal courts Yun-chien Chang and William Hubbard; 4. How lower courts respond to a change in a legal rule Anthony Niblett; 5. Career judge system and court decision biases: preliminary evidence from Japan Hatsuru Morita and Manabu Matsunaka; 6. Judges avoid ex post but not ex ante inefficiency: theory and empirical evidence from Taiwan Yun-chien Chang; 7. When winning is not enough: prevailing-party civil appeals in state courts Michael Heise; 8. The evolution of case influence in modern consumer standard form contracts Florencia Marotta-Wurgler; 9. Judging insurance antidiscrimination law Ronen Avraham, Alma Cohen and Ity Shurtz, 10. Are judges harsher with repeat offenders? Evidence from the European Court of Human Rights Eric Langlais, Alessandro Melcarne and Giovanni Ramello; 11. Does efficiency trump legality? The case of the German Constitutional Court Christoph Engel.
