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In this article, I examine court-purging in democratic transitions through the lens of judicial preferences. Specifically, I address the debate on how court-purging during a democratic transition affects the likelihood of future court-purging. I argue that the prevailing assumption is one of static, sincere judicial preferences. In contrast, I explicitly recognize the role of dynamic judicial preferences and incentives. This recognition suggests that transitional court-purging could be minimal and cautious, while the broader judicial context may eventually achieve the same policy outcomes. The dynamic perspective is crucial for understanding past court-purging strategies and for informing the conceptual debate about the rule of law in transitional justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can governments make courts politically compliant without undermining public confidence in the judicial system? Many studies show a positive relationship between judicial independence and citizens' trust in courts. However, most of them have shown static cross-sectional correlations rather than actual effects of court curbing on trust. Factors such as citizens' level of education and political preferences may also play a role in moderating reactions to court curbing. We analyse how assaults on judicial independence by populist governments in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland affected judicial trust, using a difference-in-differences approach to Eurobarometer data. While we find evidence that court curbing has an adverse effect on judicial trust, this effect is much clearer among citizens who are ideologically distant from their governments. These findings coincide with experimental evidence indicating how citizens tolerate democratic backsliding, suggesting that, for many, trust in the judicial system can subsist even when courts are made politically subservient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, many countries around the world have institutionalized judicial councils of some sort. These institutions are designed to maintain an appropriate balance between judicial independence and accountability. However, they differ in attributes and competences across the world. Our paper has two aims. First, we provide an economic theory of the formation of judicial councils and identify some of the dimensions along which they differ. Second, we test the extent to which different designs of judicial council affect judicial quality. We find that there is little relationship between councils and quality. We also offer a positive explanation for why judicial councils nevertheless remain attractive institutions. Finally, we discuss several experiences from the perspective of our theory.

The common argument to explain codification of criminal sanctions is departing from arbitrary sentencing. By limiting judicial discretion, sentencing codification should reduce disparity. By a simple theoretical model, we show that strategic judicial behavior can actually undermine statutory sentencing, thus producing more rather than less variance in severity of punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the book "The Consumer Welfare Hypothesis in Law and Economics: Towards a Synthesis for the 21st Century" by Fabrizio Esposito, the author argues for replacing the classical total welfare approach with the consumer welfare hypothesis in Law and Economics. This proposal is likely to face opposition from different strands of legal scholarship. Esposito aligns with Calabresi's Law and Economics school of thought, which prioritizes consumer welfare over total welfare. The book explores the economic pedigree of consumer welfare and examines how EU legal structures, such as antitrust and consumer law, align with the goal of maximizing consumer welfare. The author suggests that efficiency and equity are not necessarily in conflict and that economic analysis can provide valuable insights into European antitrust and consumer laws. While the book may face criticism for oversimplification and potential tautology, it offers a third way between Posnerian Law and Economics and Law and Political Economy, making it a significant contribution to legal scholarship. [Extracted from the article]

Duty of care cannot be used anymore as the touchstone to differentiate negligence from strict liability, because the scope of liability (traditionally called proximate causation) requirement replicates many of the former features. Indeed, under a negligence rule the marginal Hand formula is applied twice: first to assess whether the defendant did breach his or her duty of care, and, second, to delimit whether defendant's behavior was a proximate cause of the harm suffered by the victim. But under a strict liability rule, the Hand formula question is applied only once when the proximate causation question is raised. Traditional law and economics analysis has almost always taken normative questions raised by the causation requirement as given, which is a major flaw of mainstream models, because the centrality of the scope of liability or proximate causation requirement in real legal practice is disregarded if not simply expelled from the analysis. Then, definining the subjective scope of liability, that is to say, the boundaries of the pool of potential defendants, is the basic policy decision in each an every liability rule. In the model presented in this paper, the government first chooses efficient scope of liability, and, second, given the scope of liability, the government decides liability rule and damages that guarantee efficient precaution. In the final part of the article, most known scope of liability doctrines developed by both common law and civil law systems are described in order to show how large the common ground between negligene and strict liability can be.

Some crimes involve the cooperation of two or more criminals for mutual gain. Instead of deterring these crimes, the state can prevent them by creating distrust among criminals. The state should offer amnesty and a bounty to the criminal who first secures punishment of the other participant in a cooperative crime. We especially focus on bribes, which occur when someone pays an agent to violate a duty owed to the principal. To prevent bribes, the principal offers amnesty and a bounty to the debtor or agent who secures the other party’s punishment. Under certain conditions, the game’s equilibrium changes from cooperation to non-cooperation (prisoner’s dilemma), so bribes disappear.

Previous works on asymmetric information in asset markets tend to focus on the potential gains in the asset market itself. We focus on the market for information and conduct an experimental study to explore, in a game of finite but uncertain duration, whether reputation can be an effective constraint on deliberate misinformation. At the beginning of each period, an uninformed potential asset buyer can purchase information, at a fixed price and from a fully-informed source, about the value of the asset in that period. The informational insiders cannot purchase the asset and are given short-term incentives to provide false information when the asset value is low. Our model predicts that, in accordance with the Folk Theorem, Pareto-superior outcomes featuring truthful revelation should be sustainable. However, this depends critically on beliefs about rationality and behavior. We find that, overall, sellers are truthful 89% of the time. More significantly, the observed frequency of truthfulness is 81% when the asset value is low. Our result is consistent with both mixedstrategy and trigger strategy interpretations and provides evidence that most subjects correctly anticipate rational behavior. We discuss applications to financial markets, media regulation, and the stability of cartels.

Judicial ideology in court has attracted the attention of political scientists and legal economists. The question we address here is the extent to which ideological stability impacts the law. We consider a model where a court has two judicial ideological inclinations, majority and minority. However, they may change their relative influence over time. We show that, while both sides have a preferred legal policy and want their standard to become law, the two groups may compromise on not changing the standard, thus maintaining the status quo, because of majority uncertainty in the future. One important implication from our article is that less certainty concerning the future (in terms of majority and minority ideology) could actually make the law more stable in the present (since the standard is unchanged). In addition, we prove that moderate standards are more likely to endure the passage of time when compared to extreme standards. (JEL codes: K10, K40, H0) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]