George Priest drew an analogy between public utility regulation and relational contracts, combining legal, economic, and historical analysis to explain an evolution from municipal franchise agreements to public utility commissions. The contract analogy has the benefit of drawing attention to both the supply and demand sides of regulation. I argue that this perspective can shed […]
In exchange for a payment, insurance companies assume risks from policyholders. Because of their ability to aggregate and diversify many risks, insurers can offer this service at a price that is attractive to policyholders. Yet there are risks that insurers refuse to cover, even though the insurer appears to be in at least as favorable […]
This Article considers how the concept of sustainability might be applied in the field of tort law, with particular attention to recent developments in Italian law. When referring to “sustainable tort law,” this Article refers to a system in which liability is distributed across society through insurance. Under this framework, sustainability coincides closely with insurability. […]
In a neglected but prescient article, George L. Priest argued that the “unraveling” of markets for medical residents resulted from the monopsony power of employers. Because wages were largely fixed, early offers and acceptances of employment became an efficient form of nonprice competition—and efforts to solve the problem of unraveling through market design merely reinforced […]
In 1986, Hernando de Soto and his thinktank published El Otro Sendero (The Other Path), a ground-breaking book promoting institutional reform and property rights as a linchpin of spreading capitalism and democracy. The Other Path was acclaimed by Ronald Reagan and led the United States to support wide-scale property reform in the developing world. This […]
In the 1980s, George Priest published two seminal articles on the intellectual history of strict liability for injuries caused by defective products. First, he demonstrated that the states’ remarkably quick acceptance of such liability starting in the mid-1960s reflected the consensus among prominent legal thinkers of the wisdom of “enterprise liability” theory, which had been […]
This article is a modest response to George Priest’s lament that academics should pay more attention to capitalism as an institution. Fundamental to contract and property, which George described as forming the bedrock of capitalism, is the counterintuitive ability of participants to exercise a modicum of self-restraint, in what Tocqueville called “self-interest rightly understood” (SIRU). […]
George L. Priest’s research included a deep insight into the legal basis of capitalism. From his perspective, capitalism emerges from the rule of law and constitutional democracy, as property rights and competition require a limited government. The United States Constitution enabled the success of the United States’ economy by concentrating on limiting power. Priest’s work […]
Evidence in recent years points to a fraying of criminal antitrust enforcement. Aggregate criminal penalties have fallen dramatically, and a series of recent acquittals has reduced Department of Justice (DOJ) win rates in (Sherman Antitrust Act) Section 1 cases from previously stratospheric levels. An obvious explanation is that the overall strength of the federal enforcement […]
Like many scholars who, over the course of long careers, have focused on various dimensions of international law—in my case, principally international trade law and the institutional dimensions of economic and social development in developing countries—it is difficult not to be depressed about the current fractious state of geopolitical relations. In the brief comments that […]
Unlike other forms of insurance, such as auto, life, or commercial general liability, health insurance in the United States covers many risks that do not meet traditional criteria for insurability. A large margin of health care that we view as essential—including preventive care, care for preexisting conditions, and elective care—departs from actuarial principles of confining […]
Recent subfederal interventions into immigration policymaking have sparked an explosion of federalism scholarship, but nearly all such accounts focus on two domains: enforcement and state benefits. The literature continues to assume that the federal government maintains exclusive control over immigration status decisions. This Article challenges that conventional wisdom by identifying a third missing category of […]
When a fiscal crisis strikes a local government, local communities suffer. Fiscal crises mean that there is no money for public safety, no money for pensioners, no money to keep residents’ lights on, and no money for the basic services that make for modern life. Just ask the residents of Detroit or Puerto Rico, who […]
Venture capital is widely perceived to have a gender problem. Both founders seeking capital and the investors themselves are overwhelmingly male, fomenting concerns about how—and how fairly—the VC sector distributes its economic gains. Although gender disparities in funding are well documented, we still know little about whether the governance of VC-backed startups similarly manifests gender […]
Private law offers a unique solution to the problem of long-term fiscal commitment. When Congress enacts a spending program that will take many years to reach fruition, there is a risk of a subsequent Congress or President cutting off funding in the interim. There is no escape from the problem within appropriations law itself. One […]