Abstract This paper examines the influence of judges’ gender on decisions in marital separation cases in France. Using detailed data on both judges and cases, we do not detect significant differences between male and female judges regarding child custody or child support. However, female judges grant significantly higher compensatory allowance compared to their male counterparts. Regardless of the dispute type, female judges do not render decisions closer to the demands of either female or male litigants than male judges do. Despite evidence that women judges are more sensitive to inequalities within couples than male judges, the effects of judicial decisions do not compensate for the inequalities created at the time of separation to the detriment of women. This is not due to judicial discretion but rather from the claims presented by litigants and the weight that judges assign to these claims in their decision-making processes. This paper thus challenges the notion of a feminine and therefore feminist justice, which would be “rendered by women for women.”

Abstract Each year, millions of Americans default in their civil and criminal cases and face consequences such as arrest or eviction. Such default may not be intentional; indeed, informational interventions have decreased defaults and improved outcomes in many justice contexts, and, as a result, have become one of the most common interventions used by courts and advocates. Yet these interventions remain untested in many civil justice situations, including eviction, where power dynamics and complex choices may render them ineffective or even harmful. This Article reports on the results of the first large-scale field experiment to provide self-help to tenants facing eviction. In contrast to prior interventions in other contexts, we find no evidence that our self-help reduced default or improved outcomes. Instead, we find suggestive evidence that our self-help may have led to worse legal outcomes for Hispanic tenants and tenants with corporate landlords (as compared to non-Hispanic tenants and tenants with non-corporate landlords, respectively). These findings serve as a counterpoint to previous studies on legal interventions and suggest the limits of self-help in enabling litigants to take complex actions. They also suggest a mechanism by which self-help, by altering litigation costs for adverse parties, may unintentionally cause harm (JEL: K10, K40, K41).

Abstract Deterrence and retribution are among the most significant motives for punishing offenders. Using experimental data, we analyze whether enforcers in a deterrence-and-retribution regime punish offenders differently than enforcers in a retribution-only regime. In contrast to previous results, we find that the deterrence potential is a significant motive for punishment. The possibility of deterrence increases the average sanction by 50% and the probability that an enforcer will punish by 40%. Exploring how punishment changes when potential offenders learn the injunctive social norm regarding the offense before their violation decision, we find that the punishment probability increases only in the deterrence-and-retribution regime but not in the retribution-only one. The interaction of punishment and social norms depends on the punishment motive.

Abstract Sellers are generally required to disclose “negative” information about hidden defects of the products they sell. By contrast, buyers are generally under no comparable duties to disclose “positive” information about hidden qualities of the products they buy. The leading explanation for the law’s disparate treatment of buyers and sellers is that imposing disclosure duties on buyers would undermine their incentives to acquire costly (but socially useful) information prior to the purchase. This explanation lacks a key step: the failure to correct asymmetric information problems ex post would cause an inverse adverse selection problem ex ante. Uninformed sellers would withdraw from the market and resources would not move to higher-valuing (informed) buyers. In this paper, we develop a model that balances the benefits of information acquisition with the costs of asymmetric information, and study the incentives created by disclosure and non-disclosure rules. We show that when parties can contract around defaults at a cost, the choice of alternative disclosure rules makes a difference. Unlike disclosure rules, non-disclosure default rules yield partially separating equilibria that preserve the buyers’ incentives to acquire information and foster trade opportunities between expert buyers and uninformed sellers.

Abstract Building on Becker (1968) and Ehrlich’s (1973) model of crime, this paper shows that under the appropriate conditions crime is a Giffen good: increasing deterrence can lead to an increase in crime. This result relies upon two conditions. The first is that individuals are choosing between how much time to allocate between leisure and crime as an income-earning activity. Second, in the absence of income from criminal activity, individuals do not have access to sufficient resources to fund necessary consumption. Evidence consistent with this hypothesis is discussed. This in turn may provide an additional reason why crime reduction is so challenging. The optimal policy is derived, and it is shown that it entails a combination of redistribution and an appropriately set level of deterrence that varies with the level of social inequality.

Abstract This article examines whether there are empirical foundations for what I term the “iron law of financial regulation”: following financial crises, Congress enacts legislation that increases financial regulation, resulting in a regulatory ratchet in which new statutes are layered atop existing laws and new regulations are grafted onto existing ones, creating an increasingly complex and opaque regime. A key contention is that the shock to the economic system from a financial crisis results in legislation that is different in content and in its impact on regulation from that of legislation enacted in noncrisis times. This article investigates empirically two foundational premises of the iron law: 1. whether there is an association between financial crises and legislation; and 2. whether financial legislation enacted in the wake of crises differs significantly from that enacted in noncrisis times as measured by its content and regulatory effect. Using proxies for regulation related to textual constraints and complexity, I find that crisis-driven financial legislation has significantly greater regulatory content, and is followed by higher levels of regulation, than noncrisis-driven legislation, although the impact differs across crises, as one of three crises identified in the literature has considerably less of an effect than the others.

Abstract This paper analyzes the deterrent effects of both border patrol agents and increased United States–Mexico fencing on reported crime rates in U.S. cities located along the border, between 1992 and 2016. We find that, for cities along the United States–Mexico border, increases in the number of border patrol agents, within patrol sectors, are associated with significant declines in property crime rates and that increased border fencing is associated with significant declines in both property and violent crime rates. Further investigation into the underlying mechanisms provides evidence that border control measures are associated with significant reductions in the apprehension of migrants in the border region with prior convictions for other, non-migration-related crimes. The avoided crime indicated by the baseline estimates represents an annual economic benefit, ranging, on average, from $2,300 for an additional border patrol agent to $650,700 for an additional mile of in-city fencing, relative to an estimated cost of $174,000 to hire an agent and $2.8 million to install a mile of border fencing.

Abstract The courts often cites a “reasonable consumer” in deciding cases where a positive term on the label is alleged to have misled the consumers. For cases where the labeling language has to be simple while the product quality can be nuanced, this paper examines a few potential legal definitions of “being misled.” Upon seeing a positive term on the product label, a Bayesian consumer forms a belief, which is a distribution of the possible quality levels. A standard that holds a seller liable for using the positive term when the true quality is below a Bayesian consumer’s expectation of the quality or was deemed sufficiently unlikely low by the Bayesian consumer will cause an Akerlof (1978) style unraveling of communication. A lack of informative communication will lead to a lack of ex-ante effort in providing the quality. More efficient labeling behaviors can be encouraged by a belief-independent rule that is achievable by certification.

Abstract Ex-ante adjudication prospectively ascertains the legality of some proposed conduct. This article studies ex-ante adjudication using a signaling model. An actor may take an action that benefits herself but produces an externality to others. This action attracts a risk of ex-post adjudication and sanction. The actor seeks ex-ante adjudication before deciding how to act. Conducting ex-ante adjudication, a socially minded judge decides how accurately to ascertain whether the proposed action is sanctionable. In equilibrium, ex-ante adjudication is never fully accurate. When the threat of ex-post adjudication and sanction fails to incentivize socially desirable conduct, the judge conducting ex-ante adjudication can occasionally make erroneous rulings to encourage such conduct. She cannot err too often; otherwise, her rulings will not be followed. As the quality of ex-post adjudication or sanction worsens, surprisingly, equilibrium ex-ante adjudication must more accurately mimic ex-post adjudication; otherwise, erroneous, but socially beneficial, ex-ante rulings will no longer be followed. These results partially explain and justify the discretionary nature of ex-ante adjudication in reality. These results are also consistent with how ex-ante adjudication is conducted regarding trusts, insurance, patent validity, and international law. These results further offer normative guidance for the design and conduct of ex-ante adjudication more generally.

Abstract In 2016, J. Crew exploited a loophole in a complex debt contract, allowing it to remove $250 million of collateral from its lenders’ reach. How could a flaw like this arise in a contract between sophisticated commercial actors? Answering this question requires a model where contracts can be imperfect and evolving. We create such a model in a principal-agent setting using genetic algorithms, a tool from the complexity science literature. As in real-world practice, contracts in a genetic algorithm evolve from prior contracts, combining terms from the “parent” generation based on their past performance. Our main result is that loopholes arise as a byproduct of evolutionary learning. Through experience, contracting parties gradually allow the agent’s activity level to increase as they learn how to permit more activity without increasing agency costs. But, as activity rises, contracts become more complex in two ways. First, as the effective length of the contract increases, more value-relevant states of the world arise over time. This increases the number of potential mistaken terms that the agent can exploit. Second, the interactivity of terms increases, making loopholes more severe. As contracts evolve, then, they can achieve greater performance but also become less robust to mistakes. (JEL K12, G34)