Delict

Abstract: This collection of essays brings together the work of many of the world's leading Contract Law scholars. It focuses upon a common central theme--the question of good faith and fair dealing in the Law of Contract. The book is divided into several parts: the first part is an Introduction; Part II examines the requirement of good faith and its role in the formation of contracts; Part III is concerned with contractual obligations; Part IV examines Breach of Contract and Remedial Issues. The work will be of widespread interest to scholars of Private Law in both Common and Civil Law jurisdictions.

Abstract: Introduction 3 1. What Does Economics Have to Do with Law? 8 2. Efficiency and All that 18 3. What's Wrong with the World, Part 1 28 4. What's Wrong with the World, Part 2 36 5. Defining and Enforcing Rights: Property, Liability, and Spaghetti 47 6. Of Burning Houses and Exploding Coke Bottles 63 7. Coin Flips and Car Crashes: Ex Post versus Ex Ante 74 8. Gaines, Bargains, Bluffs, and Other Really Hard Stuff 84 9. As Much as Your Life Is Worth 95 Intermezzo. The American Legal System in Brief 103 10. Mine, Throe, and Ours: The Economics of Property Law 112 11. Clouds and Barbed Wire: The Economics of Intellectual Property 128 12. The Economics of Contract 145 13. Marriage, Sex, and Babies 171 14. Tort Law 189 15. Criminal Law 223 16. Antitrust 244 17. Other Paths 263 18. The Crime/Tort Puzzle 281 19. Is the Common Law Efficient? 297 Epilogue 309 Index 319

Abstract: Most civil disputes concern liability. The defendant is liable when the law requires him to pay damages for harm done to the plaintiff. Legal scholars discuss at least three objectives of liability law: compensating victims, deterring injurers, and spreading risk. Economic theories, in contrast, tend to understand liability law as a search for efficiency in incentives and risk-bearing. This essay synthesizes and re-conceptualizes some central results of the economic analysis of liability law and sketches the legal details that drive them. Three different legal mechanisms for creating efficient incentives are examined in turn. The first mechanism uses the legal rule of strict liability to internalize costs. The second mechanism uses a negligence standard to create and enforce efficient standards of behavior. The third mechanism uses law to channel transactions into voluntary exchange. The initial explanation of the three mechanisms makes simplifying assumptions of perfect information, solvency, costless dispute resolution and risk neutrality, before examining the results of relaxing these assumptions. The rules of the three major bodies of liability law —property, contracts and torts—will be analyzed as examples within these three mechanisms. Contract law concerns broken promises, tort law concerns accidental or intentional harm to people or property, and property law concerns appropriation of ownership rights or interference with them.