Erschienen:
Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, August 1976
Erschienen in:NBER working paper series ; no. w0146
Umfang:
1 Online-Ressource
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.3386/w0146
Identifikator:
Reproduktionsnotiz:
Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
Entstehung:
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Mode of access: World Wide Web
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Beschreibung:
The use of precedents to create rules of legal obligation has, to our knowledge, received little theoretical or empirical analysis. This paper presents and tests empirically an economic approach to legal precedent that is derived mainly from the analysis of capital formation and investment. We treat the body of legal precedents created by judicial decisions in prior periods as a capital stock that yields a flow of information services which depreciates over time as new conditions arise that were not foreseen by the framers of the existing precedents. New (and replacement) capital is created by investment in the production of precedents