Litigation as Rent-Seeking
21 Pages Posted: 27 Feb 2013
Date Written: February 25, 2013
Abstract
Litigation aims at resolving conflicts. In this chapter we survey the law and economics literature on litigation to illustrate the scope of application of rent-seeking models and their analytical power in the study of law and procedural issues of litigation, including applications in adversarial and inquisitorial procedures, fee-shifting, consolidation and bifurcation of trials and tort liability. We present a unified model of rent-seeking recasting the various perspectives in the literature, to illustrate the power of rent-seeking models in addressing different dimensions of substantive and procedural legal problems.
Keywords: Litigation expenditures, rent-seeking, fee-shifting, bifurcation, evidence and discovery
JEL Classification: B31, D72, K10, K12, K13, K41
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation