Judge Richard A. Posner's work on the economics of public law is a critical component of the interaction between the new law and economics movement and public choice theory. It exemplifies the parallel influence that these two important intellectual movements have had on the current understanding of legal institutions. Together with an insightful introduction by Francesco Parisi, this volume brings together his most important contributions on areas such as: the economics of constitutional law and legislation the economics of criminal law the economics of labour law and employment discrimination the economics of antitrust. The Economics of Public Law will be essential reading for economists, lawyers and judges alike.

The pioneering work of Judge Richard Posner has brought to light the broad relevance of economics to virtually all areas of law. During the last three decades, Judge Posner has provided seminal contributions to the development of an overarching economic theory of law, with applications including traditional legal subjects, such as torts and contracts, as well as non-standard topics, such as his study of primitive law and ancient customs. This selection of Posner's essays reveals the importance of economic efficiency as a driving force in the formation of private law. The rigorous and insightful introduction by Francisco Parisi discusses Posner's unparalleled influence on the evolution of law and economics and the understanding of the economic foundations of private law. In particular he discusses: * anthropology and the emergence of law * tort law * contract law * family law * the economics of privacy. The Economics of Private Law will be essential reading for economists, lawyers and judges alike.

Written by a lawyer and an economist, this is the first full-length economic study of tort law--the body of law that governs liability for accidents and for intentional wrongs such as battery and defamation. Landes and Posner propose that tort law is best understood as a system for achieving an efficient allocation of resources to safety--that, on the whole, rules and doctrines of tort law encourage the optimal investment in safety by potential injurers and potential victims.

The book contains both a comprehensive description of the major doctrines of tort law and a series of formal economic models used to explore the economic properties of these doctrines. All the formal models are translated into simple commonsense terms so that the "math less" reader can follow the text without difficulty; legal jargon is also avoided, for the sake of economists and other readers not trained in the law.

Although the primary focus is on explaining existing doctrines rather than on exploring their implementation by juries, insurance adjusters, and other "real world" actors, the book has obvious pertinence to the ongoing controversies over damage awards, insurance rates and availability, and reform of tort law-in fact it is an essential prerequisite to sound reform. Among other timely topics, the authors discuss punitive damage awards in products liability cases, the evolution of products liability law, and the problem of liability for "mass disaster" torts, such as might be produced by a nuclear accident. More generally, this book is an important contribution to the "law and economics" movement, the most exciting and controversial development in modern legal education and scholarship, and will become an obligatory reference for all who are concerned with the study of tort law.

This collection presents an authoritative selection of the most important articles in law and economics literature, written by distinguished scholars such as Ronald Coase, Robert Cooter, Henry Manne, Steven Shavell and Oliver Williamson. The articles are arranged by theme into 12 sections, ranging across the entire spectrum of private and public law. 66 articles, dating from 1960 to 1995 Contributors: G. Becker, G. Calabresi, R. Coase, R. Cooter, H. Demsetz, R. Epstein, W. Landes, H. Manne, S. Shavell, G. Stigler, O. Williamson

Ever since the publication in 2004 of the 9/11 Commission Report, the U.S. intelligence community has been in the throes of a convulsive movement for reform. In Preventing Surprise Attacks (2005), Richard A. Posner carried the story of the reform movement up to the enactment of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which produced a defective plan for reorganizing the intelligence system, partly as result of the failure of the 9/11 Commission and Congress to bring historical, comparative, and scholarly perspectives to bear issues. At that time, however, the new structure had not yet been built. Posner's new book brings the story up to date. He argues that the decisions about structure that the Administration has made in implementation of the Act are creating too top-heavy, too centralized, an intelligence system. The book * exposes fallacies in criticisms of the performance of the U.S. intelligence services; * analyzes structures and priorities for directing and coordinating U.S. intelligence in the era of global terrorism; * presents new evidence for the need to create a domestic intelligence agency separate from the FBI, and a detailed blueprint for such an agency; * incorporates a wealth of material based on developments since the first book, including the report of the presidential commission on weapons of mass destruction and the botched response to Hurricane Katrina; * exposes the inadequacy of the national security computer networks; * critically examines Congress's performance in the intelligence field, and raises constitutional issues concerning the respective powers of Congress and the President; * emphasizes the importance of reforms that do not require questionable organizational changes. The book is published in cooperation with the Hoover Institution

This two-volume collection provides an overview of essential works for understanding one of the most important contributions to the field of law and economics: the Coase Theorem. A variety of prominent scholars contribute crucial essays, each exploring different aspects of Coase's work. Volume I explores the origins, restatements and extensions of Coase's Theorem and contains subsections on sources, positive restatements, normative corollaries, 'Coaseanism', and Coase's intellectual legacy. Volume II considers criticisms and applications of the Coase Theorem covering surveys and applications, Coasean Bargaining, Coase and the Constitution, political markets, liability, critiques, and experimental testing of the Theorem. Along with a new and original introduction, the diverse array of authors and topics makes this compendium an indispensable tool to study one of the most cited economic theories of the 20th century.

No sitting federal judge has ever written so trenchant a critique of the federal judiciary as Richard A. Posner does in this, his most confrontational book. Skewering the politicization of the Supreme Court, the mismanagement of judicial staff, the overly complex system of appeals, the threat of originalism, outdated procedures, and the backward-looking traditions of law schools and the American judicial system, Posner has written a cri de coeur and a battle cry. With the prospect that the Supreme Court will soon be remade in substantial, potentially revanchist, ways, The Federal Judiciary exposes the American legal system's most troubling failures in order to instigate much-needed reforms. Posner presents excerpts from legal texts and arguments to expose their flaws, incorporating his own explanation and judgment to educate readers in the mechanics of judicial thinking. This rigorous intellectual work separates sound logic from artful rhetoric designed to subvert precedent and open the door to oblique interpretations of American constitutional law. In a rebuke of Justice Antonin Scalia's legacy, Posner shows how originalists have used these rhetorical strategies to advance a self-serving political agenda. Judicial culture adheres to an antiquated traditionalism, Posner argues, that inhibits progressive responses to threats from new technologies and other unforeseen challenges to society. With practical prescriptions for overhauling judicial practices and precedents, The Federal Judiciary offers an unequaled resource for understanding the institution designed by the founders to check congressional and presidential power and resist its abuse.

Each year, more than two million children around the world fall victim to commercial sexual and labor exploitation. Put simply, the growing epidemic of child exploitation demands a coordinated response. In addition to compliance concerns raised by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), UK Bribery Act, and other more familiar transnational anti-corruption laws, today's companies must also respond to more novel legal requirements, such as those contained in the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, Federal Acquisition Regulations on Trafficking in Persons in Federal Contracts, U.K. Modern Slavery Act of 2015, European Union's Directive on Transparency and its amendments, and the proposed federal Business Transparency in Trafficking and Slavery Act and other laws. This Second Edition of Child Exploitation and Trafficking: Examining Global Enforcement and Supply Chain Challenges and U.S. Responses brings fresh, practical thinking to this oft-misunderstood area of the law, helping erase some of its counterproductive mythology. The book not only provides the first comprehensive, practical introduction to the history and present-day reality of child exploitation and supply chain issues, but it also traces the interconnected web of domestic and transnational federal laws and law enforcement efforts launched in response thereto. The Second Edition not only is updated to reflect the latest trends and other development presented by two of the premier experts concerning this constantly-evolving field, but it also contains new chapters examining areas such as special issues in the fight against human trafficking and the raft of landmark anti-trafficking laws that herald a new compliance reality for the globe's business community. Written from the distinctive perspective of those who have spent their careers in the trenches investigating, prosecuting, and adjudicating these intricate, emotional cases, as well as those who are tasked with ensuring that products are free from the taint of child exploitation and force labor, the book is uniquely proscriptive, as well as descriptive, in the sense that it relies on real-world examples to serve up practical advice and reform proposals for those involved at all levels of this challenging area.

This collection is the first comprehensive selection of readings focusing on corporate bankruptcy. Its main purpose is to explore the nature and efficiency of corporate reorganization using interdisciplinary approaches drawn from law, economics, business, and finance. Substantive areas covered include the role of credit, directors' implicit bargains, nonbargaining features of bankruptcy, workouts of agreements, alternatives to bankruptcy, and proceedings in countries other than the United States, including the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan. The editors' introductions guide readers through each of the six parts, comprised of edited versions of papers combined with editorial notes to reduce the time required to absorb key ideas.

Richard Posner is famous throughout the legal world for his pioneering and controversial espousal of the belief that the study of law cannot be divorced from the study of economics. Here, in this volume of essays based upon his Clarendon Lectures, he explores the relationship between the legal systems of the UK and USA. The essays range widely over themes which will be familiar to many students and teachers of law: in the first essay he compares the work of the two most prominent writers on jurisprudence in the second half of this century, one English (HLA Hart) and one American (Ronald Dworkin). His controversial conclusion that trying to define "law" is futile, distracting and illustrative of the impoverishment of traditional legal theory will fascinate students of legal theory. In the second essay he examines a number of English cases drawn primarily from the two fields in which English and American law overlap most completely - torts and contracts. Here he argues that while in general English judges use their common sense effectively to approximate the results that an economic analyst would recommend they would do even better if they were more receptive to the economic approach to the common law - if they were, in other words, a little more like American judges. In the third essay he examines the differences between the English and American legal systems at the administrative or operational level as distinct from the jurisprudential and doctrinal levels. The conclusions drawn from his analysis challenge traditional orthodoxy. His concluding advice to law reformers in both jurisdictions is that piecemeal reform of either system is to be avoided.
In this short and highly readable work readers will find much that will delight, stimulate, and challenge them. It is a book to be read by all students and scholars of law.

A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Richard A. Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases. When conventional legal materials enable judges to ascertain the true facts of a case and apply clear pre-existing legal rules to them, Posner argues, they do so straightforwardly; that is the domain of legalist reasoning. However, in non-routine cases, the conventional materials run out and judges are on their own, navigating uncharted seas with equipment consisting of experience, emotions, and often unconscious beliefs. In doing so, they take on a legislative role, though one that is confined by internal and external constraints, such as professional ethics, opinions of respected colleagues, and limitations imposed by other branches of government on freewheeling judicial discretion. Occasional legislators, judges are motivated by political considerations in a broad and sometimes a narrow sense of that term. In that open area, most American judges are legal pragmatists. Legal pragmatism is forward-looking and policy-based. It focuses on the consequences of a decision in both the short and the long term, rather than on its antecedent logic. Legal pragmatism so understood is really just a form of ordinary practical reasoning, rather than some special kind of legal reasoning.

Supreme Court justices are uniquely free from the constraints on ordinary judges and uniquely tempted to engage in legislative forms of adjudication. More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court.

This collection is the first comprehensive selection of readings focusing on corporate bankruptcy. Its main purpose is to explore the nature and efficiency of corporate reorganization using interdisciplinary approaches drawn from law, economics, business, and finance. Substantive areas covered include the role of credit, creditors' implicit bargains, nonbargaining features of bankruptcy, workouts of agreements, alternatives to bankruptcy, and proceedings in countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan. The Honorable Richard A. Posner, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, offers a foreword to the collection.

Each year, more than two million children around the world fall victim to commercial sexual and labor exploitation. Put simply, the growing epidemic of child exploitation demands a coordinated response. In addition to compliance concerns raised by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), UK Bribery Act, and other more familiar transnational anti-corruption laws, today's companies must also respond to more novel legal requirements, such as those contained in the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, Federal Acquisition Regulations on Trafficking in Persons in Federal Contracts, U.K. Modern Slavery Act of 2015, European Union's Directive on Transparency and its amendments, and the proposed federal Business Transparency in Trafficking and Slavery Act and other laws. This Second Edition of Child Exploitation and Trafficking: Examining Global Enforcement and Supply Chain Challenges and U.S. Responses brings fresh, practical thinking to this oft-misunderstood area of the law, helping erase some of its counterproductive mythology. The book not only provides the first comprehensive, practical introduction to the history and present-day reality of child exploitation and supply chain issues, but it also traces the interconnected web of domestic and transnational federal laws and law enforcement efforts launched in response thereto. The Second Edition not only is updated to reflect the latest trends and other development presented by two of the premier experts concerning this constantly-evolving field, but it also contains new chapters examining areas such as special issues in the fight against human trafficking and the raft of landmark anti-trafficking laws that herald a new compliance reality for the globe's business community. Written from the distinctive perspective of those who have spent their careers in the trenches investigating, prosecuting, and adjudicating these intricate, emotional cases, as well as those who are tasked with ensuring that products are free from the taint of child exploitation and force labor, the book is uniquely proscriptive, as well as descriptive, in the sense that it relies on real-world examples to serve up practical advice and reform proposals for those involved at all levels of this challenging area.

A Guide to America's Sex Laws is the first concise compendium of the nation's sex laws. It summarizes the laws regulating personal sexual activity, revealing gaps, anachronisms, anomalies, inequalities, and irrationalities, and providing an empirical basis for studies of sexual regulation. Judge Richard A. Posner and Katharine B. Silbaugh cover broadly defined areas of regulation, providing background and definitions and placing the laws in their historical and constitutional context. From Alabama to Wyoming, this informative and fascinating reference book will be an essential resource. It takes only a few minutes with A Guide to [America's] Sex to realize that the nation's laws governing what two consenting adults can do with one another are an odd jumble.--Eric Fidler, San Diego Commerce Especially noteworthy is how laws governing various sexual activities vary from state to state.--Library Journal Fascinating and often surprising facts are concisely documented and conveniently organized in A Guide.--Carlin Meyer, New York Law Journal

Hailed in its first edition as an outstanding work, as stimulating as it is intellectually distinguished (New York Times), "Law and Literature" has handily lived up to the Washington Post s prediction that the book would remain essential reading for many years to come. This third edition, extensively revised and enlarged, is the only comprehensive book-length treatment of the field. It continues to emphasize the essential differences between law and literature, which are rooted in the different social functions of legal and literary texts. But it also explores areas of mutual illumination and expands its range to include new topics such as the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the Constitution, illegal immigration, surveillance, global warming and bioterrorism, and plagiarism.

In this edition, literary works from classics by Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, and Camus to contemporary fiction by Tom Wolfe, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, and Joyce Carol Oates come under Richard Posner s scrutiny, as does the film "The Matrix."

The book remains the most clear, acute account of the intersection of law and literature.

Are the elderly posing a threat to America's political system with their enormous clout? Are they stretching resources to the breaking point with their growing demands for care? Economist and legal scholar Richard A. Posner explodes the myth that the United States could be on the brink of gerontological disaster. This text seeks to offer fresh insight into a wide range of social and political issues relating to the elderly, such as health care, crime, social security, and discrimination. From the dread of death to the inordinate law-abidingness of the old, from their loquacity to their penny-pinching, Posner paints a surprisingly rich, revealing, and unsentimental portrait of the millions of elderly people in the United States. He explores issues such as age discrimination in employment, creativity and leadership as functions of age, and the changing social status of the elderly. Why are old people, presumably with less to lose, more unwilling to take risks than young people? Why don't the elderly in the United States command the respect and affection they once did and still do in other countries? How does aging affect driving and criminal records? And how does aging relate to creativity across different careers?

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made.

The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional legalist theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As "The Behavior of Federal Judges" demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes."

Henry Friendly is frequently grouped with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand as the best American jurists of the twentieth century. In this first, comprehensive biography of Friendly, David M. Dorsen opens a unique window onto how a judge of this caliber thinks and decides cases, and how Friendly lived his life. During his time on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (1959-1986), Judge Friendly was revered as a conservative who exemplified the tradition of judicial restraint. But he demonstrated remarkable creativity in circumventing precedent and formulating new rules in multiple areas of the law. Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era describes the inner workings of Friendly's chambers and his craftsmanship in writing opinions. His articles on habeas corpus, the Fourth Amendment, self-incrimination, and the reach of the state are still cited by the Supreme Court. Dorsen draws on extensive research, employing private memoranda between the judges and interviews with all fifty-one of Friendly's law clerks-a veritable Who's Who that includes Chief Justice John R. Roberts, Jr., six other federal judges, and seventeen professors at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and elsewhere. In his Foreword, Judge Richard Posner writes: "David Dorsen has produced the most illuminating, the most useful, judicial biography that I have ever read . . . We learn more about the American judiciary at its best than we can learn from any other . . . Some of what I've learned has already induced me to make certain changes in my judicial practice."

When it was first published a quarter of a century ago, Richard Posner's exposition and defense of an economic approach to antitrust law was a jeremiad against the intellectual disarray that then characterized the field. As other perspectives on antitrust law have fallen away, Posner's book has played a major role in transforming the field of antitrust law into a body of economically rational principles largely in accord with the ideas set forth in the first edition. Today's antitrust professionals may disagree on specific practices and rules, but most litigators, prosecutors, judges, and scholars agree that the primary goal of antitrust laws should be to promote economic welfare, and that economic theory should be used to determine how well business practices conform to that goal. In this thoroughly revised edition, Posner explains the economic approach to new generations of lawyers and students. He updates and amplifies his approach as it applies to the developments, both legal and economic, in the antitrust field since 1976. The "new economy," for example, has presented a host of difficult antitrust questions, and in an entirely new chapter, Posner explains how the economic approach can be applied to new industries such as software manufacturers, Internet service providers, and those that provide communications equipment and services. "The antitrust laws are here to stay," Posner writes, "and the practical question is how to administer them better-more rationally, more accurately, more expeditiously, more efficiently." This fully revised classic will continue to be the standard work in the field.

A liberal state is a representative democracy constrained by the rule of law. Richard Posner argues for a conception of the liberal state based on pragmatic theories of government. He views the actions of elected officials as guided by interests rather than by reason and the decisions of judges by discretion rather than by rules. He emphasizes the institutional and material, rather than moral and deliberative, factors in democratic decision making.

Posner argues that democracy is best viewed as a competition for power by means of regular elections. Citizens should not be expected to play a significant role in making complex public policy regarding, say, taxes or missile defense. The great advantage of democracy is not that it is the rule of the wise or the good but that it enables stability and orderly succession in government and limits the tendency of rulers to enrich or empower themselves to the disadvantage of the public. Posner's theory steers between political theorists' concept of deliberative democracy on the left and economists' public-choice theory on the right. It makes a significant contribution to the theory of democracy--and to the theory of law as well, by showing that the principles that inform Schumpeterian democratic theory also inform the theory and practice of adjudication. The book argues for law and democracy as twin halves of a pragmatic theory of American government.

Judges and legal scholars talk past one another, if they have any conversation at all. Academics couch their criticisms of judicial decisions in theoretical terms, which leads many judges-at the risk of intellectual stagnation-to dismiss most academic discourse as opaque and divorced from reality. In Divergent Paths, Richard Posner turns his attention to this widening gap within the legal profession, reflecting on its causes and consequences and asking what can be done to close or at least narrow it. The shortcomings of academic legal analysis are real, but they cannot disguise the fact that the modern judiciary has several serious deficiencies that academic research and teaching could help to solve or alleviate. In U.S. federal courts, which is the focus of Posner's analysis of the judicial path, judges confront ever more difficult cases, many involving complex and arcane scientific and technological distinctions, yet continue to be wedded to legal traditions sometimes centuries old. Posner asks how legal education can be made less theory-driven and more compatible with the present and future demands of judging and lawyering. Law schools, he points out, have great potential to promote much-needed improvements in the judiciary, but doing so will require significant changes in curriculum, hiring policy, and methods of educating future judges. If law schools start to focus more on practical problems facing the American legal system rather than on debating its theoretical failures, the gulf separating the academy and the judiciary will narrow.

Like other dangerous but pleasurable activities, such as downhill skiing and mountain climbing, engaging in unprotected sex implicitly involves the weighing of costs and benefits. Recognizing that the transmission of the AIDS virus is a consequence of personal choices - often rational and informed - to engage in risky conduct, the authors employ the tools of economic analysis to reassess the orthodox approach to AIDS by public health specialists. Standard predictions of the spread of AIDS, the authors argue, are questionable because they ignore rational behavioral responses to the risk of infection. For the same reason, customary recommended public health measures, such as extensive testing for the AIDS virus, not only may be ineffective in controlling the spread of the disease but may actually cause it to spread more rapidly. The authors examine regulatory measures and proposals such as mandatory testing, criminal punishments, and immigration controls, as well as the subsidization of AIDS education and medical research, the social and fiscal costs of AIDS, the political economy of the government's response, and the interrelation of AIDS and fertility risk. Neither liberal nor conservative, yet on the whole skeptical about governmental involvement in the epidemic, this book is certain to be controversial, but its injection of hard-headed economic thinking into the AIDS debate is long overdue. Although Private Choices and Public Health is accessible to the interested general reader, it will also capture the attention of economists - especially those involved in health issues - epidemiologists, public health officials, and specialists in sexual behavior and drug addiction.