Litigation as Rent-Seeking

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

Parisi, Francesco and Luppi, Barbara, Litigation as Rent-Seeking (February 25, 2013). U of St. Thomas Legal Studies Research Paper No. 13-07, Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 13-15, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2224179 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2224179