This essay examines the critical challenge of balancing government intervention and market freedom, drawing insights from the intellectual collaboration and contestation between Owen Fiss and George Priest. Comparing the United States and Europe, the analysis reveals that while America achieves superior economic performance through market-oriented policies, Europe demonstrates better health outcomes, lower inequality, and more […]

Early in his career, Professor George Priest floated the idea of the law-school-as-university, in which scholars and teachers would employ the social sciences to understand how the law affects human behavior. He contended that the traditional study of doctrine was both uninteresting and of little consequence. In this essay I contend that Professor Priest’s advocacy, […]

Antitrust law, particularly the Supreme Court’s decisions in National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n v. Board of Regents, 468 U.S. 85 (1984), and National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n v. Alston, 594 U.S. 69 (2021), has fundamentally changed college sports. Intercollegiate athletics, at least at the major conference level and particularly (but not exclusively) with respect to football and […]

Priest and Klein’s Selection of Disputes for Litigation has been one of the most influential legal articles of all time. This Essay reviews its contribution to legal scholarship. Priest and Klein’s central and enduring contribution is the recognition that some cases are more likely to settle than others. It follows that litigated disputes are not […]

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 […]