Sanctions in Pre-Trial Discovery

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In this paper, we make an economic analysis of various sanctions for disobedience to the discovery request in the common law tradition and in the civil law tradition mainly by examining their effects on settlement rates and social welfare. We find that sanctioning through inference discloses less information and encourages less settlements than both sanctioning by default judgment and sanctioning adopted in the civil law tradition. Also, we show that sanctioning through inference used together with financial sanction duplicates the outcome under default judgment if the penalty size is so chosen as to be equal to the defendant's discovery cost.