About the Program
The John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at the University of Virginia School of Law supports faculty and student interests and research relating to the economic analysis of legal issues. The program stimulates discussions and debate through conferences, workshops and lectures. It encourages student research through colloquia.
The John M. Olin Foundation Inc. was established in 1953 by John Merrill Olin (1892-1982) — inventor, industrialist, conservationist and philanthropist. Olin was committed to the preservation of the principles of political and economic liberty as they have been expressed in American thought, institutions and practice.
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
Jason S. Johnston
Blaine T. Phillips Distinguished Professor in Environmental Law
Nicholas E. Chimicles Research Professor of Business Law and Regulation
Director, John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics
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, 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.
Corporations, securities and real estate law; consumer financial markets
- Ph.D. in economics, Yale University
- Prior to law school, worked as a software engineer for Microsoft
- Recent scholarship focuses on how law can help reform 401(k) plans (Faculty Q&A)
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
Contracts and professional responsibility
- Ph.D. in economics, University of Pennsylvania
- Clerked for Judge Walter K. Stapleton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
- A member of the American Law and Economics Association who has served as an ethics consultant and expert for several law firms (Faculty Q&A)
- Co-authored the books "The Law and Ethics of Lawyering" and "Foundations of the Law and Ethics of Lawyering"
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
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
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
Bankruptcy and consumer finance law
- Ph.D. in economics, University of Pennsylvania
- Practiced law with Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Los Angeles
- Hynes focuses on parallel systems outside of bankruptcy that handle debtor-creditor relations, including the use of state courts to collect debts. (Scholarship Profile)
Intellectual property, law and economics
- Clerked for the Israeli Supreme Court after earning his law degree at Tel Aviv University
- Served as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Olin Center for Law and Economics
- Has presented in several fora, including the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum; the annual meetings of the American, Canadian and European law and economics associations; and the intellectual property scholars conference. (Story)
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
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
Corporate law and corporate finance
- Received the John M. Olin Prize for outstanding S.J.D. dissertation in law and economics at Harvard Law School
- Her article, "Market Segmentation: The Rise of Nevada as a Liability-Free Jurisdiction," was named among the 10 best corporate and securities law articles published in 2012, in an annual poll of corporate law professors conducted by Corporate Practice Commentator (Story)
- Scholarship integrates law and finance (Scholarship Profile). Her article "What Happens in Nevada? Self-Selecting into Lax Law," was published in the Review of Financial Studies.
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)
Civil litigation; law and psychology
- Ph.D. in psychology, University of California, Berkeley
- Scholarship focuses on legal judgment and decision-making, the psychology of justice and the application of social science to legal theory and policy (Faculty Q&A)
- Mitchell's background in social psychology informs his work, which explores how human reactions to legal rules vary across individuals and are influenced by context. (Scholarship Profile)
Workshops
The workshop program invites law and economics scholars from our own faculty and from other schools to deliver working drafts of their papers to the faculty and a small group of students at Virginia. Faculty and students attending are encouraged to read the paper prior to each workshop, which will be held in the Faculty Lounge on Tuesdays from 11:30 a.m.-12:50 p.m., unless otherwise indicated. After brief introductory remarks by the workshop guests, questions and discussion will follow for the remainder of the session. Lunch will be provided.
Full UVA Law Specialty Workshop Schedule
Spring 2023
Feb. 7
Nuno Garoupa (George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School)
Feb. 21
Prasad Krishnamurthy (University of California, Berkeley, School of Law)
March 14
Holger Spamann (Harvard Law School)
March 28
Jill E. Fisch (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School)
April 11
Jacob Goldin (University of Chicago Law School)
April 25
Paige Marta Skiba (Vanderbilt University Law School)
Fall 2022
Sept. 13
Doron Teichman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law)
Doron Teichman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law)
Sept. 27
Adriana Robertson (University of Chicago Law School)
Oct. 18
Sepehr Shahshahani (Fordham University School of Law)
Nov. 1
Adi Leibovitch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law)
Nov. 22
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler (New York University School of Law)
Dec. 6
Abhay Aneja (University of California, Berkeley, School of Law)
Spring 2022
Feb. 8
Maya Sen (Harvard)
Feb. 22
Yonathan Arbel (University of Alabama School of Law)
March 15
Philip Cook (Duke)
March 29
Jens Frankenreiter (Washington University in St. Louis School of Law)
April 12
Charles Crabtree (Dartmouth College) — Caplin Pavilion
April 26
Jonah Gelbach (UC Berkeley School of Law)
Fall 2021
Sept. 14
Adam Chilton (University of Chicago Law)
Sept. 28
Amalia R. Miller (UVA) and Melissa K. Spencer (University of Richmond)
Oct. 19
Ben Grunwald (Duke Law)
Nov. 2
Oren Bar-Gill (Harvard Law School)
Nov. 16
Weijia Rao (Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University)
Nov. 30
Zachary Liscow (Yale Law School)
Spring 2021
Online Via Zoom, 12:30 p.m.- 1:40 p.m.
Feb. 2
Catherine Tucker (MIT)
Feb. 16
Michael Simkovic (USC Gould School of Law) and Eric Allen (University of California, Riverside)
March 2
Netta Barak-Corren (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
March 23
Bocar Ba (UC Irvine)
April 6
Crystal Yang (Harvard Law)
April 20
Shayak Sarkar (UC Davis)
April 27
Katerina Linos (Berkeley)
Fall 2020
Online Via Zoom, 12:30 p.m.- 1:40 p.m.
Sept. 15
Michael Frakes (Duke Law)
Sept. 29
Elliott Ash (ETH Zurich)
Oct. 20
Jeremy McClane (Illinois College of Law)
Oct. 27
Caroline Cecot (Antonin Scalia Law School, Geoge Mason University)
Nov. 10
Melissa Wasserman (University of Texas at Austin School of Law)
Nov. 24
Jennifer Doleac (Texas A&M University)
Spring 2020
Jan. 21
David Hyman (Georgetown)
Feb. 11
Tatiana Homonoff (NYU Wagner)
Feb. 25
Tamar Kricheli-Katz (Tel Aviv)
March 24
Rachel Potter (UVA)
April 7
Jordan Neyland (GMU)
Fall 2019
Sept. 17
Ashley Langer (Arizona)
Sept. 24
Lewis Kornhauser (NYU)
Oct. 29
Yair Listokin (Yale)
Nov. 12
Rory VanLoo (Boston)
Nov. 19
Cindy Alexander (SEC)
Spring 2019
Feb. 12
Jonah Gelbach (Penn)
Feb. 26
Ken Ayotte (UC Berkeley)
March 26
Claudia Landeo (Alberta)
April 9
Anne Piehl (Rutgers)
April 23
Anne Meng (UVA)
Fall 2018
Sept. 25
Keith Hylton (Boston University)
Oct. 16
Lara Buchak (UC Berkeley)
Oct. 30
Daniel Sokol (Florida)
Nov. 13
Jens Frankenreiter (Max Planck Institute)
Nov. 27
Abby Wood (USC)
Spring 2018
Feb. 13
Paige Skiba (Vanderbilt)
Feb. 27
Anne Piehl (Rutgers)
March 20
Alison Morantz (Stanford)
April 3
Jake Gersen (Harvard)
April 10
Damon Jones (Chicago)
April 17
Bert Huang (Columbia)
Fall 2017
Sept. 12
Yehonatan Givati (Hebrew)
Sept. 26
Andrea Chandrasekhe (UC Davis)
Oct. 24
Jon Elster (Columbia)
Oct. 31
Gary Libecap (UCSB)
Nov. 7
Georg Vanberg (Duke)
Nov. 28
Mitchell Polinsky (Stanford)
Academic Conferences
The John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics conducts an academic conference each year that strives to push economic analysis beyond its traditional subject areas in law and broaden the appeal of the conference to other disciplines.
Law and Economics of Consumer Credit
Friday and Saturday, March 26-27, 2010
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
Just two decades ago, little data existed even on the most rudimentary aspects of the criminal process, such as the numbers and types of convictions each year. In our fragmented criminal system, no central data gathering was conducted between the thousands of independent federal, state and local jurisdictions. Criminal justice data collection is still far from what should be desired. However, increasingly useful data is collected concerning each stage of the criminal process ranging from initial police stops, interrogations, guilty pleas, convictions, sentencing decisions, post-conviction review, to subsequent exonerations. A new wave of legal scholarship constructs new data sets and conducts more refined and ambitious empirical analysis. Criminal law scholarship also increasingly examines from a theoretical perspective the complex incentives surrounding criminality, prosecutorial charging, conviction, and sentencing.
The 2010 Olin Conference at the University of Virginia School of Law examines this growing and productive intersection of law and economics and criminal law. Scholars from economics, law, and criminology will examine different aspects of the criminal process. Papers analyze problems ranging from litigation costs, sentencing accuracy, racial profiling, deterrence, wrongful convictions, and judicial behavior. Participants will discuss the presented papers and more generally will explore what can be learned from the latest theoretical and empirical work analyzing criminal law from a law and economics perspective.
Law and Economics of Consumer Credit Law
Friday and Saturday, April 17-18, 2009
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
After 50 years of legal and regulatory efforts to promote equality of opportunity in workplaces, one might expect social scientists to have reached consensus on what measures work to combat employment discrimination. But no such consensus exists. Social scientists offer many opinions on equal employment opportunity “best practices,” but surprisingly little evidence supports many of these opinions.
The key to advancing knowledge about how to combat workplace discrimination effectively is to determine which of the many competing assertions about the incidence, causes, and cures of workplace discrimination are supported by sound evidence. The 2009 Olin Conference at the University of Virginia will bring together leading scholars from economics, law, political science, psychology, sociology, and statistics to synthesize what we know about what works and what does not work in combating workplace discrimination and to discuss how we can most effectively learn what works and then communicate this information to organizations, courts, and policymakers.
Law and Economics of Consumer Credit
Friday and Saturday, February, 22-23, 2008
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
Dramatic and controversial changes have occurred in both consumer lending markets and the laws that regulate these markets. This conference brings together scholars in the fields of law, economics, and finance to discuss some of the pressing issues that have emerged from the recent changes with an aim to better evaluate various legislative proposals that have been proposed in response. Papers cover a range of topics from payday lending to subprime mortgage to consumer bankruptcy.
Law and Finance
Friday and Saturday, March 23-24, 2007
Contact: Joyce Holt
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Recent advances in economic theory, as well as a growing body of empirical evidence, have highlighted the strong connections between the fields of law and finance. Today's financial economists rely heavily on the characteristics of legal institutions and contracts to explain the behavior of corporations and markets, while today's scholars in law and economics draw on financial theories and data to critically examine the organization and structure of law. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly common for law and finance scholars to work together in pursuing their research endeavors. This conference brings together top researchers in the fields of law and finance to discuss the topics that are of cutting-edge importance. The Conference is co-sponsored with the McIntire School of Commerce.
The Law and Economics of Organizations
Friday and Saturday, February 24-25, 2006
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
Both legal and economic scholars have critically examined various aspects of modern organization since Coase's seminal article on the theory of the firm in 1937, including: an organization's economic and legal boundary, its hierarchical structure, incentive and promotion within an organization, and control within and across organizations. This conference aims to bring together scholars from the allied fields to examine the recent developments in the field and also to provide a more holistic view of the modern organization theory.
John M. Olin Conference on Real Options and the Law
Friday and Saturday, October 1-2, 2004
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
Real options techniques are widely used in finance and economics to evaluate investment flexibility and to design multi-period strategies that maximize returns from flexibility. Legal scholars have begun to apply real options analysis to a range of legal contexts in which a party enjoys a discretionary right: for example, the right of an actor to commit a wrong (or breach a contract) and incur liability, the right of the innocent party to choose among remedies, the right to file a law suit and proceed through multi-staged litigation. This conference brings together scholars who have introduced options analysis to law in their prior writing, to examine a range of legal options.
John M. Olin Conference on Empirical Research in Corporate, Bankruptcy, and Securities Law
Friday and Saturday, February 27-28, 2004
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
This conference assembles scholars from law school and business school faculties to discuss recent empirical work in the fields of corporate, bankruptcy, and securities law. This work is part of a broader trend towards empirical research in law and economics. The goal of the conference is to not only evaluate recent, notable findings, but also to promote greater dialogue between law and business faculties on topics of mutual interest and on empirical methodology. The papers covered a range of topics from insider trading and corporate governance in Southeast Asia to the governance structure of spinoffs.