About the Program
The University of Virginia has a renowned history in political economy. Beginning in the 1950s, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock applied economics to political processes and wrote “The Calculus of Consent,” a classic study of constitutional democracy. In 1960, Ronald Coase wrote “The Problem of Social Cost,” a foundational paper on economics and law. Together these UVA professors won two Nobel Prizes, founded academic fields, and influenced thousands of scholars and students.
The Center for Public Law and Political Economy continues this tradition. UVA Law features a large and distinguished group of scholars who apply insights from economics and political science to the study of public law, including constitutional law, election law, regulation and tax. The center unites and supports their scholarship. The center also provides students, researchers and practitioners with opportunities to connect with these ideas through workshops, conferences and other events.
Oren Bar-Gill
Lee C. Buchheit
Lenders are perfectly free to decide for themselves whether, when, how, to whom and on what terms they will extend credit to a sovereign borrower. But...
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This Essay is built around a central empirical claim: that most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting...
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This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...
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Both theorists and courts commonly assume that high-dollar financial contracts between sophisticated parties are free of linguistic errors...
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Aurelie Ouss
Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure that released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can create...
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Faculty Director
Joshua Fischman
Professor of Law
Director, Center for Public Law and Political Economy
Oren Bar-Gill
Lee C. Buchheit
Lenders are perfectly free to decide for themselves whether, when, how, to whom and on what terms they will extend credit to a sovereign borrower. But...
More
This Essay is built around a central empirical claim: that most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting...
More
This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...
More
Both theorists and courts commonly assume that high-dollar financial contracts between sophisticated parties are free of linguistic errors...
More
Aurelie Ouss
Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure that released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can create...
More
June Carbone
The pathway to stable and secure middle-class status involves two elements: the ability to postpone family formation to facilitate human capital...
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The past few years have witnessed a particular accusation leveled repeatedly and loudly at the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority: that...
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Michael S. Knoll
Courts and commentators have long understood dormant Commerce Clause doctrine to contain two types of cases: discrimination and undue burdens. This...
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A key question in the academic and policy debates over the optimal architecture for sovereign debt has long been whether sovereigns should be given...
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Lee C. Buchheit
In days of yore, sovereign borrowers needing debt relief negotiated with two groups of creditors—the bilateral (government) creditors that comprised...
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We examine the legal terms in the market for green bonds, debt instruments in which proceeds are earmarked, directly or indirectly, for projects with...
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Lee C. Buchheit
All sovereign debt restructurings are inherently messy, expensive, exasperating, time-consuming and contentious. These are the familiar pathologies in...
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In this article we examine the relations between risk, the choice of foreign or local contract terms (parameters) and maturity in the sovereign debt...
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This article examines the impact of Greece retroactively, via legislation, changing the terms in hundreds of billions of euros worth of Greek...
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Yonathan A. Arbel
False information causes harm, threatening individuals, groups, and society. Many people struggle to judge the veracity of the information around them...
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Wenwen Ding
As China reformed its economy during the past 44 years, it experienced the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history, with an annual...
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This Article considers one aspect of the ongoing debate about the moral limits of markets—namely, the purported harmful effects of market transactions...
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This article analyses those hurdles, which are different for privately owned property such as oligarch yachts and state property such as bank deposits...
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How dangerous must a person be to justify the state in locking her up for the greater good? The bail reform movement, which aspires to limit pretrial...
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People sometimes want to harm other people. This truism points to a blind spot in law and economics scholarship, which generally assumes that people...
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Kim Oosterlinck
Ugo Panizza
Mark C. Weidemaier
... In 1825, France conditioned its grant of recognition to the new nation of Haiti on the payment of 150 million francs plus trade benefits. The payments...
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Paolo Colla
An implication of the incompleteness of contracts is that there are going to be gaps and ambiguities that either side can exploit. We ask whether the...
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Michael Bradley
Irving de Lira Salvatierra
W. Mark C. Weidemaier
... In 2018, Russia began inserting an unusual clause into euro and dollar sovereign bonds, seemingly designed to circumvent future Western sanctions. The...
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Does the U.S. Constitution guarantee a right to a vaccine passport? In the United States and elsewhere, vaccine passports have existed for over a...
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David Blankfein-Tabachnick
Shifts in academic paradigms are rare. Still, it was not long ago that the values taken to govern the private law were thought to be distinct from the...
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This chapter describes the rise of transborder anti-bribery law in this century against the background of its twentieth-century origins. It focuses on...
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The use of economic statecraft is at a high-water mark. The United States uses sanctions, tariffs, and import and export controls more than ever...
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The constitutional rules that govern how states engage with international law have profound implications for foreign affairs, yet we lack...
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Kim Oosterlinck
Ugo Panizza
Mark C. Weidemaier
... This article introduces the Haitian Independence Debt of 1825 to the odious debt and sovereign debt literatures. We argue that the legal doctrine of...
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The sale of organs and gametes, the use of commercial surrogates, and trade in blood and plasma are examples of what have been termed "contested...
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Pascal Saint-Amans
In this essay, we review criticisms of both the concept of international tax arbitrage and regulatory responses meant to reduce such arbitrage. We...
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Peter Howard
Feedbacks within the climate-economy system are complex. The research analyzing the relationship between human activities and the climate is...
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We explore how adding pro-social preferences to the canonical precaution model of accidents changes either the efficient damages rule or the harm from...
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This paper, published as Chapter 16 in Johnston, Climate Rationality (CUP 2021), explains how the U.S. government has derived its estimates of the...
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Jennifer L. Doleac
We evaluate the impacts of adopting algorithmic risk assessments as an aid to judicial discretion in felony sentencing. We find that judges' decisions...
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When individuals are arrested or indicted for a crime, governments have legitimate interests in assuring that those individuals show up for future...
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Hard cases present a dilemma at the heart of constitutional law. Courts have a duty to decide them—to vindicate rights, to clarify law—but doing so...
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National restrictions on trade and immigration are the most salient illustrations of the current protectionist moment, but cities have played their...
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Many jurisdictions determine real property taxes based on a combination of current market values and the recent history of market values, introducing...
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This Essay explores how private landowners bargain with federal environmental regulatory authorities under two important federal environmental permit...
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Comparisons between rules and standards often revolve around enforcement costs. According to conventional wisdom, rules are cheaper to enforce than...
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Because judges are expected to decide cases through the impartial application of existing law, they are often reluctant to admit that they must make...
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Robert D. Cooter
This chapter addresses a new and fertile research program: constitutional law and economics. Constitutional law and economics asks questions like,...
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Bo Cowgill
We examine the microeconomics of using algorithms to nudge decision-makers toward particular social outcomes. We refer to this as "algorithmic social...
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Those who wish to control, expose, and damage the identities of individuals routinely do so by invading their privacy. People are secretly recorded in...
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One of the most disputed policy initiatives of the Obama administration was the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which subjects brokers and other...
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Many popular and academic commentators identify deregulation as a cause of the 2007-08 financial crisis. Some argue that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of...
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Behavioral Law and Economics’ effort to replace standard microeconomic assumptions with more realistic, yet still simple assumptions — without...
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In the contemporary world, the domains of laws overlap a lot. With human activity (business, family, political, creative) unfolding at a greater...
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This paper uses a natural experiment to analyze whether incarceration during the pretrial period affects case outcomes. In Philadelphia, defendants...
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Recent years have seen a rush toward evidence-based tools in criminal justice. As part of this movement, many jurisdictions have adopted actuarial...
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Sandra Mayson
This Article seeks to provide the most comprehensive national-level empirical analysis of misdemeanor criminal justice that is currently feasible...
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Philip J. Cook
Ethicists who oppose compensating kidney donors claim they do so because kidney donation is risky for the donor’s health, donors may not appreciate...
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This chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics offers an economic theory of how the law of agency and partnership facilitates economic...
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The legal consequences of an action often depend on information that only the actor knows. This information is typically inferred from the observable...
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Adam Smith is not normally identified as an important figure in law and economics. However, his Lectures on Jurisprudence contain a surprising number...
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Michael S. Knoll
Last Term, a sharply divided Supreme Court decided a landmark dormant Commerce Clause case, Comptroller of the Treasury of Maryland v. Wynne . Wynne...
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In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce otherwise innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to...
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Lee C. Buchheit
The decade and a half of litigation that followed Argentina’s sovereign bond default in 2001 ended with a great disturbance in the Force. A new...
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Should law respond readily to society’s evolving views, or should it remain fixed? This is the question of entrenchment, meaning the insulation of law...
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Free Market Criminal Justice explains how faith in democratic politics and free markets has undermined the rule of law in US criminal process. America...
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This article, written for a symposium on Bond v. United States , connects the law and economics of contract interpretation to the Supreme Court’s...
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Notwithstanding ERISA’s fiduciary requirements, a significant portion of 401(k) plans establish investment menus with options that predictably lead to...
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This Essay examines and explains the positions of the principal interest groups over the past four decades with respect to the two central questions...
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Joseph Blocher
The drama in Ukraine has occupied global headlines for many months now and — while there are occasional signs that things are calming down — the...
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This chapter considers the psychological, methodological, and normative paths taken by behavioral law and economics ("BLE") and alternative paths that...
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Not enough kidneys are donated each year to satisfy the demand from patients who need them. Strong moral and legal norms interfere with market-based...
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Michael Bradley
One of the primary policy initiatives instituted in response to the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis is a requirement that all Eurozone sovereign bonds...
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President Obama’s 2011 Executive Order 13,563 on cost-benefit analysis (CBA) authorizes agencies to consider “human dignity” in identifying the costs...
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Lee C. Buchheit
The Eurozone debt crisis is entering its third year. The original objective of the official sector’s response to the crisis -- containment -- has...
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Mark C. Weidemaier
For two decades, collective action clauses (CACs) have been part of the official-sector response to sovereign debt crisis, justified by claims that...
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The Greek debt restructuring of 2012 stands out in the history of sovereign defaults. It achieved very large debt relief – over 50 per cent of 2012...
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Anna Gelpern
The Greek debt crisis prompted EU officials to embark on a radical reconstruction of the European sovereign debt markets. Prominently featured in this...
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Anna Gelpern
This paper examines the contract interpretation strategies adopted by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) for its credit...
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Jeromin Zettelmeyer
Within the next couple of months, the Greek government, is supposed to persuade private creditors holding about EUR 200bn in its bonds to voluntarily...
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Lee C. Buchheit
Perhaps Greece - a country with a debt to GDP already approaching 150 percent and set to move even higher - avoids a debt restructuring. Perhaps not...
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Economists have documented pervasive correlations between legal origins, modern regulation, and economic outcomes around the world. Where legal origin...
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In recent years, scholars have devoted considerable attention to transnational networks of financial regulators and their efforts to develop uniform...
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Default on sovereign debt is a form of political risk. Issuers and creditors have responded to this risk both by strengthening the terms in sovereign...
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Conventional wisdom holds that boilerplate contract terms are ignored by parties, and thus are not priced into contracts. We test this view by...
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In Testing as Commodification, Katharine Silbaugh argues that debates within the standardized testing literature represent a split similar to the one...
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How the myriad bank regulatory agencies, including the Fed, SEC, FDIC, OCC, helped unleash the banks to create more and more destructive derivatives...
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Significant intellectual and financial resources have been committed to decentralization projects in the developing world based on the idea that...
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Significant intellectual and financial resources have been committed to decentralization projects in the developing world based on the idea that...
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Scholars of urban law and policy tend to assume that local officials can exert some influence over city well-being. More specifically, the literature...
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Lee C. Buchheit
Sovereign debt problems were once thought to be a third world affliction. They still are. But as events of the last two years have shown...
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In October 2000 a hedge fund holding an unpaid debt claim won an enormous victory against the debtor, the Republic of Peru, through an opportunistic...
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This article explores the growth of business outsourcing, how it works, and why two firms might logically enter into an outsourcing arrangement not...
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Given the existence of contract, property, fraud, and company law, what is the purpose of securities laws? Broadly speaking, they can serve either of...
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In There’s No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy, 94 Virginia L. Rev. 1787...
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June Carbone
In this paper, we will incorporate gender consciousness into critiques of the rational actor model by revisiting Carol Gilligan's account of moral...
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Lee C. Buchheit
Conventional wisdom is that sovereigns will rarely, if ever, default on their external debts in circumstances where it is clear that they have the...
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Anna Gelpern
This essay highlights a phenomenon that has no place in the conventional theory of sophisticated business contracts: the term that makes no sense as...
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The recent wave of global warming legislation and litigation represents a triumph for climate change activists. But it is in no way a rational...
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The study of contract law is undergoing a difficult transition as it moves from the theoretical to the empirical. Over the past few decades scholars...
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This short essay conducts a review of Victor Goldberg's 2006 book entitled Framing Contract Law. Part I offers a basic overview of Goldberg's analysis...
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This article addresses the timely yet persistent question of how best to regulate access to telecommunications networks. Concerns that private firms...
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The role of cities and local government generally has gone unexamined by legal scholars of the constitutional common market. Yet in a highly urbanized...
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Anna Gelpern
For over a decade, contracts literature has focused on standardization. Scholars asked how terms become standard, and why they change so rarely. This...
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Sarah Ludington
The few years since the U.S. incursion into Iraq in 2003 have witnessed an explosion in the literature on odious debts - that is, debts incurred (a)...
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Daniel I. Halperin
The tax rules governing deferred compensation, codified at section 409A, are harsh and complex. The rules are focused on the least important policy...
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Heinz's wholly owned subsidiary purchased on the market over $131 million worth of Heinz's common shares. A few months later, the subsidiary sold 95%...
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Although extralegal enforcement is widely acknowledged, the conventional understanding of written contract provisions, such as the complex and...
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Omri Ben-Shahar
This article argues that the cost of odious debt ought to be borne by the party who is best positioned to prevent the accumulation of such debt...
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This paper develops a model of the competition among states in providing corporate law rules. Such competition is shown to produce optimal rules with...
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Anna Gelpern
This article revisits a recent shift in standard form sovereign bond contracts to promote collective action among creditors. Major press outlets...
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In this article, Professor Yale reviews the contingent liability tax shelter employed by Black & Decker, and critiques the arguments the government...
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This article analyzes the law and economics of market internalization: the capability of markets to both penalize and reward firms for their...
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Using a hand collected new data set, this paper examines in detail a classic account of stock market manipulation - the stock pools of the 1920s...
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Daniel M. Klerman
This paper assesses the impact of judicial independence on equity markets. North and Weingast (1989) argue that judicial independence and other...
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This essay considers the concept of libertarian paternalism recently advanced by Sunstein and Thaler and argues that, on close inspection, this...
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The rule of Hadley v. Baxendale enjoys an important place in the economic analysis of contract law. Over time, Hadley has taken on great significance...
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Scott Baker
Since the rapid rise in organizational forms for business associations, academics and practitioners have sought to explain the choice of form...
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Chris Sanchirico
Legal rules may be general (that is, applicable to a broad range of situations) or specific. Adopting a custom-tailored rule for a specific activity...
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This report is a comprehensive explanation of the final INDOPCO regulations and corresponding changes to regulations under sections 167 and 446. The...
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William A. Klein
A central question of law and economics is how complex productive activity is initiated, organized, and carried out successfully without central...
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Stephen J. Choi
Network externalities may lead contracting parties to stay with a standardized term despite preferences for another term. Using a dataset of sovereign...
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William W. Bratton
In April 2002 the International Monetary Fund introduced a sovereign bankruptcy proposal only to be rebuffed by the United States Treasury. Where the...
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Karl M. Manheim
One of the most important features of the architecture of the Internet is the Domain Name System (DNS), which is administered by the Internet...
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Devon W. Carbado
Legal academics often perceive law and economics (L&E) and critical race theory (CRT) as oppositional discourses. Using a recently published...
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This essay discusses Eric Posner's book Law and Social Norms, focusing on Posner's theory of norm adherence as a costly signal of an individual's...
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Eric A. Posner
This survey of the law and economics of consumer finance discusses economic models of consumer lending and evaluates the major consumer finance laws...
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Lee C. Buchheit
One hundred years ago in the United States, confronted by the urgent need to find a debt workout procedure for large corporate and railroad bond...
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Terrance O'Reilly
This paper examines the feasibility of a proposed criterion for the admission of expert econometric testimony. Professor David Kaye suggests that the...
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Recent finance scholarship finds that countries with legal systems based on the common law provide better investor protections and have more developed...
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This essay will appear as an entry in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Law and Economics (2d ed.), published by Edward Elgar. The essay surveys the law...
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When a government contracts with a private firm to supply a service previously supplied by the government, questions arise as to whether the private...
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This paper develops a simple economic framework that is used to explain and critique the recent trend favoring site-specific contractual commitments...
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A common debate among securities lawyers, regulators and professionals is whether and to what extent the internationalization of securities markets...
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Resident Faculty
Law and economics, international relations, international law, immigration and refugee law, judging
- Ph.D. candidate in political science, University of Michigan (expected 2019)
- Created the first judicial ideology measure covering every Article III judge in the federal judiciary
- Currently working to develop a method that could help international treaty negotiators achieve global-welfare-increasing cooperation
- Clerked for three federal judges, including Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and practiced government enforcement litigation law in Washington, D.C., with Skadden, Arps
Law and economics, quantitative methods/statistics in the law
- Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- His research interests include law and economics, empirical methods, judicial decision-making and criminal sentencing
Legislation, election law, law and economics, and direct democracy
- Ph.D., Jurisprudence and Social Policy, University of California, Berkeley
- Scholarship applies economic analysis to election law and constitutional design
- Clerked for Judge William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
- The first law professor to receive the UVA Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award
Tax law and policy, behavioral economics
- Ph.D. in economics from University of California, Berkeley; M.Sc. in economics and philosophy from the London School of Economics
- Hayashi's research on "tax salience" — meaning how visible a tax is — showed a correlation between higher salience and a higher number of appeals of property tax assessments
- Serves as a McDonald Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University
Law and economics, environmental liability
- Ph.D. in economics, University of Michigan
- Clerked for Gilbert S. Merritt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
- Has served on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association, on the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science grant review panel, and on the Board of the Searle Civil Justice Institute
- Former director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School
- Johnston currently working on a book that critically analyzes the foundations of global warming law and policy.
Corporate law and securities, industrial and intellectual property, economic regulation and history
- Was special assistant to the solicitor general of the United States and executive director of the Civil Aeronautics Board Committee on Procedural Reform
- Was a member of the Committee on Public-Private Sector Interactions in Vaccine Innovation of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences (1983-85)
- Co-authored books include "Selected Statutes and International Agreements on Unfair Competition, Trademarks, Copyrights and Patents" and "Intellectual Property and Unfair Competition"
Environmental law and climate change, administrative law
- Clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
- Founding executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law
- Co-authored "Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health." The book became the foundation for a new approach public interest organizations could take in arguing for policies to protect the environment. (Faculty Q&A on related scholarship)
Property, corporations and land conservation, nonprofit organizations
- Has also taught at the University of Southern California Law School and the University of Chicago Law School
- Scholarly articles include works on land preservation, eminent domain, health care reform and property rights in human biological materials
- Practiced law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
Corporations, securities regulation, contracts
- Former Dean of the Law School (2008-16)
- Clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and for Judge Ralph K. Winter, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
- Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Worked on legal reform projects in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Nepal
State, international taxation and policy
- National reporter for the United States to the 2008 IFA Congress on tax discrimination and the 2014 European Associate Tax Law Professors Congress on tax information exchange
- Co-editor of Kluwer's "Series on International Taxation" and a member of the editorial board of the World Tax Journal
- Mason's research focuses on comparative taxation, with an emphasis on EU tax law.
- Amicus brief cited by U.S. Supreme Court in Comptroller of the Treasury of Maryland v. Wynne.
- Has a four-part special report on EU state aids forthcoming in Tax Notes
International law, including international environmental law and counterfactual diplomatic history
- Clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Judge Carl McGowan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
- Was a policy analyst in the behavioral sciences department of the RAND Corp.
- Setear’s academic interests include a short course on the law of baseball, and research into contractual “deals with the devil” in popular culture. (Story)
International law, business and economics
- Clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. and for Judge Levin Campbell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
- Has taught extensively abroad (Story)
- Worked on a variety of projects involving law reform in former socialist states after the collapse of the Soviet Union, including Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Albania and Slovakia on behalf of the U.S. Treasury, and in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan on behalf of the International Monetary Fund
- Helped win case against Russian government's seizure of oil company (Story)
- Is the coordinating reporter on the Fourth Restatement, providing guidance on foreign relations law (Story)
Criminal law and criminal procedure
- Economist and criminal justice scholar focused on criminal justice reform, including bail, algorithmic risk assessment, misdemeanors and juvenile justice
- Research on bail cited extensively in a landmark federal civil rights decision, O’Donnell v. Harris, and in the media
- Holds a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley
International law and business, financial regulation
- Practiced corporate and financial law with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in New York City
- Is one of five Canadians to be awarded the Diploma of the Hague Academy of International Law since 1950
- Writes on the international regulation of banking and securities markets, the law of foreign state immunity, and the application of international law in domestic courts around the world
Employment law and discrimination, contracts, contract theory, law and economics
- M.Phil. in economics, Yale University
- A pioneer in the use of technology in the classroom, won a $10,000 Hybrid Challenge Grant for Technology-Enhanced Teaching to convert his first-semester Contracts course into flipped classroom model of instruction (Story)
- Author of an open-source Contracts casebook published by the CALI eLangdell Press. (Link)
- Recent scholarship focuses on information-forcing rules in contracts and on vicarious liability for employee torts
- In 2013, began an empirical study of law school teaching practices and how they affect student experiences and outcomes
Comparative law and human rights
- D.Phil. in socio-legal studies, Oxford University
- Has written on the constitutions of nations, including the declining influence of the U.S. Constitution (Story)
- Named a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, which provided her with a $200,000 award to expand her research into the world's constitutions to better understand how constitutional rights are enforced in different countries. (More)
- Gained human rights experience working at the U.N. Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute in Turin and at the Southern Africa Litigation Centre in Johannesburg
Sovereign debt
- Focuses on sovereign debt restructuring and contracts, and explores how to help countries in financial distress
- Co-hosts the podcast “Clauses and Controversies,” is a contributor to the blog Creditslips.org, and serves as regional editor for the journal Capital Markets Law Journal
- His work on contracts frequently addresses their often-unexpected nature, and he has questioned the assumption that parties fully understand the provisions and outcomes of deals
- Has also written on “odious debts” — whether debts made by preceding regimes, such as that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, should always be honored by future governments
Comparative and empirical study of public law, courts and legal texts
- Internationally recognized expert in the comparative study of constitutional law, constitutional politics and judicial politics, and a pioneer in the application of empirical social science methods to the study of legal texts
- Scholarship combines qualitative fieldwork on foreign judicial and constitutional systems, quantitative analysis of constitutions and treaties, and regional expertise on Asia
- Ph.D. in political science, Stanford University; his work on courts and constitutions has been featured in media around the world and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Romanian and Persian
Privacy, First Amendment, feminism and the law, civil rights, administrative law
- Named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow for her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy
- Adviser to then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris on privacy issues and a member of her Cyber Exploitation Task Force (2014-16)
- Vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting civil rights and liberties in a digital age
- Gave TED talk “How Deepfakes Undermine Truth and Democracy” that has had over 1.9 million views
- Clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Mary Johnson Lowe of the Southern District of New York
Courses
Many core courses at the Law School integrate concepts from political economy into the study of public law. Examples include Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, International Law, Legislation, and State and Local Government Law. In addition, the Law School offers many specialized courses that explore connections between law and political economy in greater depth. The following is a list of courses offered during the current and two previous academic years. Numbers in parentheses indicate which academic year(s) the courses were offered, i.e., 2020-21 is coded (21), 2021-22 is coded (22) and 2022-23 is coded (23). (SC) stands for short course and (YR) stands for yearlong.
Capitalism and Socialism (22)
Comparative Constitutional Law (21,22,23)
Feminism and the Free Market (21,22)
International Law of Migration and Refugees (21)
Legislation and Regulation (21,22,23)
Monetary Constitution Seminar (22,23)
Regulatory Law and Policy (21,22,23)
Negotiating Constitutions (21)
Constitutional Law and Economics (23)
Judging (21)
Advanced Campaign Finance (22,23)
Rules (21,22)
Building the Rule of Law (21)
Regulation of the Political Process (21,22,23)
Climate Change Law and Policy (21)
University of Virginia School of Law Vice Dean Michael D. Gilbert’s new co-authored textbook applies economic analysis to the field of public law. The publisher, Oxford University Press, has made the book available for free online.
University of Virginia law professor Mitu Gulati looks at the tragic history of Haiti’s 19th-century “odious debt” to France after islanders won their freedom from slavery, and discusses whether Haiti could recoup what it lost.
Courses
Many core courses at the Law School integrate concepts from political economy into the study of public law. Examples include Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, International Law, Legislation, and State and Local Government Law. In addition, the Law School offers many specialized courses that explore connections between law and political economy in greater depth. The following is a list of courses offered during the current and two previous academic years. Numbers in parentheses indicate which academic year(s) the courses were offered, i.e., 2020-21 is coded (21), 2021-22 is coded (22) and 2022-23 is coded (23). (SC) stands for short course and (YR) stands for yearlong.
Capitalism and Socialism (22)
Comparative Constitutional Law (21,22,23)
Feminism and the Free Market (21,22)
International Law of Migration and Refugees (21)
Legislation and Regulation (21,22,23)
Monetary Constitution Seminar (22,23)
Regulatory Law and Policy (21,22,23)
Negotiating Constitutions (21)
Constitutional Law and Economics (23)
Judging (21)
Advanced Campaign Finance (22,23)
Rules (21,22)
Building the Rule of Law (21)
Regulation of the Political Process (21,22,23)
Climate Change Law and Policy (21)
University of Virginia School of Law Vice Dean Michael D. Gilbert’s new co-authored textbook applies economic analysis to the field of public law. The publisher, Oxford University Press, has made the book available for free online.
University of Virginia law professor Mitu Gulati looks at the tragic history of Haiti’s 19th-century “odious debt” to France after islanders won their freedom from slavery, and discusses whether Haiti could recoup what it lost.
Beyond the Classroom
The Law School offers many opportunities for students to explore public law and political economy. The Law and Economics Workshop hosts researchers from around the world, many of whom concentrate on public law topics. The Law and Economics Research Paper Series features work by UVA Law faculty, including many papers that draw on social science to study public law. Faculty affiliated with the center regularly supervise independent studies that result in published student notes.
Related Centers
UVA Law supports other programs and centers whose activities overlap with public law and political economy, including the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy, the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, the Virginia Center for Tax Law, and the Center for International & Comparative Law. Beyond the Law School, UVA is home to the Democracy Initiative, a campus-wide program focused on studying and advancing democracy worldwide. The Democracy Initiative supports the Corruption Lab on Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law.
Student Organizations
A thriving community of student organizations hosts events and publishes scholarship at the intersection of public law and political economy. These include the American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society, the J.B. Moore Society of International Law, Common Law Grounds, the Journal of Law & Politics, and the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law.
Professor Megan Stevenson of the University of Virginia School of Law and her team have received a $200,000 grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to study the long-term effects of incarceration.
UVA Law professor John Monahan discusses how predicting violence became a concern for courtrooms and mental health practices nationwide, and developed alongside his own career.