Ever since the publication in 2004 of the 9/11 Commission Report, the U.S. intelligence community has been in the throes of a convulsive movement for reform. In Preventing Surprise Attacks (2005), Richard A. Posner carried the story of the reform movement up to the enactment of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which produced a defective plan for reorganizing the intelligence system, partly as result of the failure of the 9/11 Commission and Congress to bring historical, comparative, and scholarly perspectives to bear issues. At that time, however, the new...

Richard A. Johnson's work on the economics of public law is an important component of the interaction between the law and economics movement and public choice theory. This volume brings together works on topics such as the economics of criminal law and the economics of antitrust.

This reader brings together some seminal papers on law and economics, with special emphasis on the foundational contributions to the economics of property, contracts and torts. The growing influence of these writings in the judicial profession, and in the academic world, underscores the relevance and importance of these early contributions and the growing maturity of the law and economics movement. These papers have provided the foundations for the development of an overarching economic theory of law and, most importantly,have opened new areas of research for present and future generations of...

This two-volume collection provides an overview of essential works for understanding one of the most important contributions to the field of law and economics: the Coase Theorem. A variety of prominent scholars contribute crucial essays, each exploring different aspects of Coase's work. Volume I explores the origins, restatements and extensions of Coase's Theorem and contains subsections on sources, positive restatements, normative corollaries, 'Coaseanism', and Coase's intellectual legacy. Volume II considers criticisms and applications of the Coase Theorem covering surveys and applications,...

Catastrophic risks are much greater than is commonly appreciated. Collision with an asteroid, runaway global warming, voraciously replicating nanomachines, a pandemic of gene-spliced smallpox launched by bioterrorists, and a world-ending accident in a high-energy particle accelerator, are among the possible extinction events that are sufficiently likely to warrant careful study. How should we respond to events that, for a variety of psychological and cultural reasons, we find it hard to wrap our minds around? Posner argues that realism about science and scientists, innovative applications of...

Judge Richard A. Posner is internationally regarded as a leading exponent and founding father of the law and economics movement. This volume draws together a selection of his most important papers on the methodology and the theory of law and economics. The themes explored in this book include: the economics of common law; the criterion of wealth maximization; an economic approach to judicial rulemaking; the application of finance theory to law; and the methodology of law and economics.