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This chapter focuses on dispute resolution in French labor courts. We empirically investigate the forces that shape decision-making in the pretrial conciliation phase. For that purpose, we compiled a new database from legal documents. The results are twofold. First, conciliation is less likely when plaintiffs are assisted by a lawyer. Although this result might be interpreted in various ways, further analysis shows that the lawyers’ remuneration scheme is the most likely cause of this effect. Second, we find that the likelihood of settlement decreases as the amount at stake increases. These results contribute to the ongoing debate about French labor court reform.

Patent litigation consists of non-market actions that firms undertake to access intellectual property rights defined by prior legislation and enforced by the courts. Thus, patent litigation provides an interesting context in which to explore aspects of firm’s non-market strategies. In contrast with prior non-market strategy research that has largely focused on how political institutions define the rules of the game for market competition, non-market actions within patent litigation primarily seek to access and apply these broad policies to specific situations, products, or assets that matter to the firm. Furthermore, because such non-market actions are directly influenced by the firms’ market strategies, they represent a promising area for research on integrated (market and non-market) strategies as well.

The goal of this paper is to explain how generic patent strategies that firms use to support their competitive advantage in the product-market influence non-market outcomes related to the timing of patent litigation resolution. In contrast with prior research that has studied settlement in patent litigation essentially as a one-shot bargaining game, this paper seeks to explain litigation resolution as an outcome of the competing mechanisms of settlement and adjudication that operate continually during litigation. Using a large sample of patent litigations in research medicines and computers, I model the timing of patent litigation resolution in a proportional hazards framework, wherein settlement and adjudication are competing risks. The evidence found is consistent with the proposition that the speed with which patent litigation is resolved by either settlement or adjudication reflects the use of proprietary, defensive, and leveraging patent strategies by firms. These findings also help to explain unexpected and anomalous findings regarding the settlement of patent litigation reported in prior research.

We survey several of the theoretical models that have been applied to the analysis of the GATT/WTO dispute settlement process. These include repeated game models, which emphasize the punishment aspect of dispute settlement, and incomplete contracting models, which emphasize the “gap-filling” aspect. Our analysis emphasizes the implications of these models for the strengthening of the dispute settlement process under the WTO and for its application to the TRIPS agreement. We also discuss how models of settlement bargaining can be applied to obtain empirical predictions about which cases will actually proceed to an actual finding by the dispute panel.

This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.

This paper surveys published economic studies and judicial decisions that contain 1,040 quantitative estimates of overcharges of hard-core cartels. The primary finding is that the median long-run overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods is 25.0%:18.8% for domestic cartels and 31.0% for international cartels. Cartel overcharges are positively skewed, pushing the mean overcharge for all successful cartels to 43.4%. Convicted cartels are on average as equally effective at raising prices as unpunished cartels, but bid-rigging conduct does display somewhat lower mark-ups than price-fixing cartels. These findings suggest that optimal deterrence requires that monetary penalties ought to be increased.