{"title":"Erratum to: Drawing the Legal Family Tree: An Empirical Comparative Study of 170 Dimensions of Property Law in 129 Jurisdictions","authors":"Yun-chien Chang, Nuno Garoupa, M. Wells","doi":"10.1093/jla/laab004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laab004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45189,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Analysis","volume":"132 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76111204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Holger Spamann, Lars Klöhn, Christophe Jamin, Vikramaditya S. Khanna, J. Liu, Pavan Mamidi, Alexander Morell, I. Reidel
In our lab, 299 real judges from seven major jurisdictions (Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, and USA) spend up to fifty-five minutes to judge an international criminal appeals case and determine the appropriate prison sentence. The lab computer (i) logs their use of the documents (briefs, statement of facts, trial judgment, statute, precedent) and (ii) randomly assigns each judge (a) a horizontal precedent disfavoring, favoring, or strongly favoring defendant, (b) a sympathetic or an unsympathetic defendant, and (c) a short, medium, or long sentence anchor. Document use and written reasons differ between countries but not between common and civil law. Precedent effect is barely detectable and estimated to be less, and bounded to be not much greater than, that of legally irrelevant defendant attributes and sentence anchors.
{"title":"Judges in the Lab: No Precedent Effects, No Common/Civil Law Differences","authors":"Holger Spamann, Lars Klöhn, Christophe Jamin, Vikramaditya S. Khanna, J. Liu, Pavan Mamidi, Alexander Morell, I. Reidel","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3700289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3700289","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In our lab, 299 real judges from seven major jurisdictions (Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, and USA) spend up to fifty-five minutes to judge an international criminal appeals case and determine the appropriate prison sentence. The lab computer (i) logs their use of the documents (briefs, statement of facts, trial judgment, statute, precedent) and (ii) randomly assigns each judge (a) a horizontal precedent disfavoring, favoring, or strongly favoring defendant, (b) a sympathetic or an unsympathetic defendant, and (c) a short, medium, or long sentence anchor. Document use and written reasons differ between countries but not between common and civil law. Precedent effect is barely detectable and estimated to be less, and bounded to be not much greater than, that of legally irrelevant defendant attributes and sentence anchors.","PeriodicalId":45189,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Analysis","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89207409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Leasing may be the most important legal institution that has received virtually no systematic scholarly attention. Real property leasing is familiar in the context of residential tenancies. But it is also widely used in commercial contexts, including office buildings and shopping centers. Personal property leasing, which was rarely encountered before World War II, has more recently exploded on a world-wide basis, with everything from autos to farm equipment to airplanes being leased. This article seeks to develop a composite picture of the defining features of leases and why leasing is such a widespread and highly successful economic institution. The reasons fall under three general headings. (i) Leasing is an attractive method of financing the acquisition of assets, especially for persons who have limited capital or would like to conserve their capital and cash flows for other purposes. (ii) Leasing is a device for minimizing the risks that either lessees or lessors associate with owning assets; although leasing also creates risks, various lease modifications have been developed to manage these derivative risks. (iii) By dividing the rights to an asset between lessor and lessee, leasing permits the parties to specialize in different functions and to solve various impediments to contracting that would be difficult to overcome among separate owners. Understanding the economic advantages of leasing is an important first step in considering possible legal reforms of leasing.
{"title":"The Economics of Leasing","authors":"Merrill T.","doi":"10.1093/jla/laaa003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laaa003","url":null,"abstract":"<span><div>Abstract</div>Leasing may be the most important legal institution that has received virtually no systematic scholarly attention. Real property leasing is familiar in the context of residential tenancies. But it is also widely used in commercial contexts, including office buildings and shopping centers. Personal property leasing, which was rarely encountered before World War II, has more recently exploded on a world-wide basis, with everything from autos to farm equipment to airplanes being leased. This article seeks to develop a composite picture of the defining features of leases and why leasing is such a widespread and highly successful economic institution. The reasons fall under three general headings. (i) Leasing is an attractive method of financing the acquisition of assets, especially for persons who have limited capital or would like to conserve their capital and cash flows for other purposes. (ii) Leasing is a device for minimizing the risks that either lessees or lessors associate with owning assets; although leasing also creates risks, various lease modifications have been developed to manage these derivative risks. (iii) By dividing the rights to an asset between lessor and lessee, leasing permits the parties to specialize in different functions and to solve various impediments to contracting that would be difficult to overcome among separate owners. Understanding the economic advantages of leasing is an important first step in considering possible legal reforms of leasing.</span>","PeriodicalId":45189,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Analysis","volume":"127 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138520776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or “patent racing,” has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically and never at scale. This article introduces an empirical way to identify patent races, and provides the first broad-based view of them in the real world. It reveals that patent races are common, particularly in information-technology fields. The article then analyzes the effect of winning a patent race, showing that patent race winners do significantly more follow-on innovation, and their follow-on research is more similar to what was covered by the patent.(JEL CODES: O34, O32, O31)
{"title":"Does Winning a Patent Race lead to more follow-on Innovation?","authors":"Thompson N, Kuhn J.","doi":"10.1093/jla/laaa001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laaa001","url":null,"abstract":"<span><div>Abstract</div>Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or “patent racing,” has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically and never at scale. This article introduces an empirical way to identify patent races, and provides the first broad-based view of them in the real world. It reveals that patent races are common, particularly in information-technology fields. The article then analyzes the effect of winning a patent race, showing that patent race winners do significantly more follow-on innovation, and their follow-on research is more similar to what was covered by the patent.(JEL CODES: O34, O32, O31)</span>","PeriodicalId":45189,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Analysis","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138520853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Locke’s labor theory, the most familiar of property theories, has faced centuries of philosophical criticism. Nonetheless, recent legal scholars have applied it to intellectual property while overlooking these philosophical critiques. Philosophers, on the other hand, are largely absent in IP theorizing, thus not asking whether Locke’s resilient intuition is salvageable in copyright’s domain. This Article argues that Lockean copyright is actually far more plausible than Lockean property, for it avoids the most devastating objections the latter faces. It then defends a surprising doctrinal implication of this theoretical conclusion: a workable Lockean copyright favors rights far more limited than present law.
{"title":"Lockean Copyright versus Lockean Property","authors":"Chatterjee M.","doi":"10.1093/jla/laaa002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laaa002","url":null,"abstract":"<span><div>Abstract</div>Locke’s labor theory, the most familiar of property theories, has faced centuries of philosophical criticism. Nonetheless, recent legal scholars have applied it to intellectual property while overlooking these philosophical critiques. Philosophers, on the other hand, are largely absent in IP theorizing, thus not asking whether Locke’s resilient intuition is salvageable in copyright’s domain. This Article argues that Lockean copyright is actually far more plausible than Lockean property, for it avoids the most devastating objections the latter faces. It then defends a surprising doctrinal implication of this theoretical conclusion: a workable Lockean copyright favors rights far more limited than present law.</span>","PeriodicalId":45189,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Analysis","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138520781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Traditional comparative private law scholars have a firm grasp of laws in several countries, but rarely of those in more than one hundred countries. Quantitative comparative private law scholars have placed dozens of countries into a legal family genealogy, but not based on a systematic understanding of legal substance around the world. Using a unique, hand-coded data set on 108 property doctrines (transformed into 170 binary variables) in 129 jurisdictions, we ran supervised and unsupervised machine-learning algorithms. Some of our findings confirm the conventional wisdom: French and German property laws are influential; mixed jurisdictions like South Africa and Scotland are one of a kind; common law jurisdictions form a group of their own; and a handful of formerly socialist countries, led by Russia, cluster together. Unlike the prior literature, however, we do not find that East Asian jurisdictions warrant a category of their own; but belong to distant groups. Spain and many Latin American countries form a separate group. Rather than finding a clear-cut common versus civil law division, we observe that the France-inspired group is one supercluster, separate from other jurisdictions.
{"title":"Drawing the Legal Family Tree: An Empirical Comparative Study of 170 Dimensions of Property Law in 129 Jurisdictions","authors":"Yun-chien Chang, Nuno Garoupa, M. Wells","doi":"10.1093/JLA/LAAA004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JLA/LAAA004","url":null,"abstract":"Traditional comparative private law scholars have a firm grasp of laws in several countries, but rarely of those in more than one hundred countries. Quantitative comparative private law scholars have placed dozens of countries into a legal family genealogy, but not based on a systematic understanding of legal substance around the world. Using a unique, hand-coded data set on 108 property doctrines (transformed into 170 binary variables) in 129 jurisdictions, we ran supervised and unsupervised machine-learning algorithms. Some of our findings confirm the conventional wisdom: French and German property laws are influential; mixed jurisdictions like South Africa and Scotland are one of a kind; common law jurisdictions form a group of their own; and a handful of formerly socialist countries, led by Russia, cluster together. Unlike the prior literature, however, we do not find that East Asian jurisdictions warrant a category of their own; but belong to distant groups. Spain and many Latin American countries form a separate group. Rather than finding a clear-cut common versus civil law division, we observe that the France-inspired group is one supercluster, separate from other jurisdictions.","PeriodicalId":45189,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Analysis","volume":"180 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77500732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Contemporary property theory highlights information costs as the central determinant of exclusion rights and numerus clausus-type standardization: rising information costs lead to stronger exclusion rights and more standardization, whereas falling information costs have the opposite effect. This paradigmatic model lacks, however, a theory of how information costs change in the first place. By developing such a theory, this article demonstrates that, in prominent cases, the legal impact of information costs tends to be counterbalanced by concurrent changes in individual preference, and that preexisting predictions about the relationship between information costs, standardization, and exclusion are therefore partially wrong, and otherwise incomplete.
{"title":"Beyond Information Costs: Preference Formation and the Architecture of Property Law","authors":"Zhang T.","doi":"10.1093/jla/laz007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laz007","url":null,"abstract":"<span><div>Abstract</div>Contemporary property theory highlights information costs as the central determinant of exclusion rights and numerus clausus-type standardization: rising information costs lead to stronger exclusion rights and more standardization, whereas falling information costs have the opposite effect. This paradigmatic model lacks, however, a theory of how information costs change in the first place. By developing such a theory, this article demonstrates that, in prominent cases, the legal impact of information costs tends to be counterbalanced by concurrent changes in individual preference, and that preexisting predictions about the relationship between information costs, standardization, and exclusion are therefore partially wrong, and otherwise incomplete.</span>","PeriodicalId":45189,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Analysis","volume":"37 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138520805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Locke’s labor theory, the most familiar of property theories, has faced centuries of philosophical criticism. Nonetheless, recent legal scholars have applied it to intellectual property while overlooking these philosophical critiques. Philosophers, on the other hand, are largely absent in IP theorizing, thus not asking whether Locke’s resilient intuition is salvageable in copyright’s domain. This Article argues that Lockean copyright is actually far more plausible than Lockean property, for it avoids the most devastating objections the latter faces. It then defends a surprising doctrinal implication of this theoretical conclusion: a workable Lockean copyright favors rights far more limited than present law.
{"title":"Lockean Copyright versus Lockean Property","authors":"Mala Chatterjee","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3423423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3423423","url":null,"abstract":"Locke’s labor theory, the most familiar of property theories, has faced centuries of philosophical criticism. Nonetheless, recent legal scholars have applied it to intellectual property while overlooking these philosophical critiques. Philosophers, on the other hand, are largely absent in IP theorizing, thus not asking whether Locke’s resilient intuition is salvageable in copyright’s domain. This Article argues that Lockean copyright is actually far more plausible than Lockean property, for it avoids the most devastating objections the latter faces. It then defends a surprising doctrinal implication of this theoretical conclusion: a workable Lockean copyright favors rights far more limited than present law.","PeriodicalId":45189,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Analysis","volume":"79 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88079292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Transferable Development Rights (TDRs) were supposed to be a solution to the intractable problems of land use, a bit of institutional design magic that married the interests of development and preservation at no cost to taxpayers and with no legal risk. Under a TDR program, development is limited or barred on properties targeted for preservation or other regulatory goals, but owners of those lots are allowed sell their unused development rights to other property owners. In theory, this allows the same amount of development to occur while preserving favored uses without tax subsidies or constitutional challenges. Reviewing their use over the last forty years, this Article shows that the traditional justifications for TDRs do not work. In practice, TDRs are not necessary to avoid takings litigation, are not costless to taxpayers, and do not balance the interests of preservation and development, but instead serve as yet another growth control in metropolitan areas where such controls have caused housing crises and major harms to the national economy. Assessed as a technocratic tool for solving problems in land use, TDRs are a failure. But this Article shows that there is a case for TDRs not as a technocratic but rather as a political tool. By giving valuable development rights to some popular or otherwise politically influential owners of regulated property, a city can build a coalition for re-zonings that might otherwise be politically impossible. The effect of TDRs on politics can be positive to the extent that TDRs strengthen constituencies or land use goals that local politics systematically undercounts, as we show through an analysis of New York City’s Special District Transfer TDR program. In particular, TDRs could help break Not In My Back Yard opposition to new development by building a competing pro-growth coalition. More generally, using TDRs as an example, the Article shows how land use law is the creator as well as creature of local politics. Existing property law helps cement anti-development coalitions, but savvy leaders could use moments in power to create stable pro-growth coalitions by enacting new laws that help mobilize new pro-growth constituencies. Understanding these “constituency effects” of land use law allows policymakers to redesign entitlements like TDRs to produce a healthier land use policies.
可转让发展权(tdr)被认为是解决棘手的土地使用问题的一种方法,是一种制度设计的魔法,它将发展和保护的利益结合在一起,不需要纳税人付出代价,也没有法律风险。根据TDR计划,为保护或其他监管目标而开发的物业受到限制或禁止,但这些地块的所有者可以将其未使用的开发权出售给其他业主。理论上,这允许在保留有利用途的同时进行同等数量的开发,而无需税收补贴或宪法挑战。本文回顾了过去四十年来tdr的使用情况,表明传统的tdr理由并不成立。在实践中,tdr并不是避免征收诉讼的必要条件,对纳税人来说也不是没有成本的,也没有平衡保护和发展的利益,而是在大都市地区作为另一种增长控制手段,这种控制已经造成了住房危机,并对国民经济造成了重大损害。作为解决土地使用问题的技术官僚工具,tdr是失败的。但这篇文章表明,tdr不是作为一种技术官僚,而是作为一种政治工具。通过将宝贵的开发权给予受监管房产的一些受欢迎的或在政治上有影响力的所有者,一个城市可以建立一个联盟来重新划分区域,否则这在政治上是不可能的。正如我们通过对纽约市特区转移TDR计划的分析所显示的那样,TDR对政治的影响可以是积极的,因为TDR加强了地方政治系统低估的选区或土地使用目标。特别是,tdr可以通过建立一个与之竞争的支持增长的联盟,帮助打破反对新开发的“不要在我的后院”(Not In My backyard)。更一般地说,本文以tdr为例,说明土地使用法既是地方政治的创造者,又是地方政治的创造者。现有的物权法有助于巩固反发展联盟,但精明的领导人可以利用掌权的时机,通过颁布新的法律,帮助动员新的支持增长的选民,来建立稳定的支持增长的联盟。理解了土地使用法的这些“选民效应”,政策制定者就可以重新设计像tdr这样的权利,从而制定更健康的土地使用政策。
{"title":"Building Coalitions Out of Thin Air: Transferable Development Rights and “Constituency Effects” in Land Use Law","authors":"R. Hills,, David Schleicher","doi":"10.1093/jla/laz008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laz008","url":null,"abstract":"Transferable Development Rights (TDRs) were supposed to be a solution to the intractable problems of land use, a bit of institutional design magic that married the interests of development and preservation at no cost to taxpayers and with no legal risk. Under a TDR program, development is limited or barred on properties targeted for preservation or other regulatory goals, but owners of those lots are allowed sell their unused development rights to other property owners. In theory, this allows the same amount of development to occur while preserving favored uses without tax subsidies or constitutional challenges. Reviewing their use over the last forty years, this Article shows that the traditional justifications for TDRs do not work. In practice, TDRs are not necessary to avoid takings litigation, are not costless to taxpayers, and do not balance the interests of preservation and development, but instead serve as yet another growth control in metropolitan areas where such controls have caused housing crises and major harms to the national economy. Assessed as a technocratic tool for solving problems in land use, TDRs are a failure. But this Article shows that there is a case for TDRs not as a technocratic but rather as a political tool. By giving valuable development rights to some popular or otherwise politically influential owners of regulated property, a city can build a coalition for re-zonings that might otherwise be politically impossible. The effect of TDRs on politics can be positive to the extent that TDRs strengthen constituencies or land use goals that local politics systematically undercounts, as we show through an analysis of New York City’s Special District Transfer TDR program. In particular, TDRs could help break Not In My Back Yard opposition to new development by building a competing pro-growth coalition. More generally, using TDRs as an example, the Article shows how land use law is the creator as well as creature of local politics. Existing property law helps cement anti-development coalitions, but savvy leaders could use moments in power to create stable pro-growth coalitions by enacting new laws that help mobilize new pro-growth constituencies. Understanding these “constituency effects” of land use law allows policymakers to redesign entitlements like TDRs to produce a healthier land use policies.","PeriodicalId":45189,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Analysis","volume":"65 1","pages":"79-135"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77852399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}