Volume 1, Issue 3

World governance today is characterized by international organizations lacking democratic legitimacy and control by the citizens they claim to represent. They are also criticized for being inefficient. This leads to violent protests and to NGOs having great influence. To address these problems, we propose international governance based on the democratic idea of citizen participation: All citizens of the member countries of international organizations have the potential right to participate in the decision-making of international organizations via initiatives, referendums and recalls. In order to reduce transaction costs, a representative group of citizens is randomly selected who can actually exercise their participation rights.

This article studies the optimal scope of negligence, considering which of the parties’ precautionary measures should be included in the determination of negligence and which instead should be omitted. The analysis shows that the optimal scope of negligence balances the gains derived from improved accident prevention with the administrative costs of the system. This approach also provides insights concerning not only the notions of care and activity level and their respective boundaries, but also the choice between strict liability and negligence.

The paper deals with a bilateral accident situation in which victims have heterogeneous costs of care. With perfect information, efficient care by the injurer raises with the victim's cost. When the injurer cannot observe at all the victim's type, and this fact can be verified by Courts, first-best cannot be implemented with the use of a negligence rule based on the first-best levels of care. Second-best leads the injurer to intermediate care, and the two types of victims to choose the best response to it. We explore in particular detail the more interesting case of imperfect observation of the victim's type, characterizing the optimal solution and examining the different legal alternatives when Courts cannot verify the injurers' statements. Counterintuitively, we show that there is no difference at all between the use by Courts of a rule of complete trust and a rule of complete distrust towards the injurers' statements. We then relate the findings of the model to existing rules and doctrines in Common Law and Civil Law legal systems.

Professors Goldberg vigorously attacks the merits of the “Three Tenors” decision while emphasizing the issue of whether the challenged restraint resides within the boundaries of the firm. Professor Muris responds that the Commission’s analysis is correct as a matter of law and fact, and that Professor Goldberg’s call for a market power screen for all horizontal restraints ignores the legal costs of rulemaking. I take a third view of the debate. While conceding that per se rule is properly applied to “naked restraints,” I show that the Commission’s analysis relies on an inappropriately narrow view of the ancillary restraints doctrine in order to justify application of the per se rule. In particular, the Commission’s emphasis on the timing of the restraint as well as its hostility towards PolyGram’s free rider defense are not supported as a matter of law. In any event, the facts of the Three Tenors do not support the Commission’s conclusion that the moratorium agreement was not ancillary to the joint venture.

Professor Wright mischaracterizes both the legal basis and the factual context of the FTC's Three Tenors opinion, recently affirmed by Judge Ginsburg's opinion for a unanimous panel of United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Neither opinion's legal analysis relies on the timing of the moratorium agreement. Under either opinion, the agreement to eliminate advertising and price competition would have been proscribed even had it occurred when the joint venture was formed. Moreover, the factual underpinnings of the case differ from Professor Wright's assertions. In particular, the facts demonstrate that the joint venture did not attempt to promote the combination of various three tenors products. The only coordination with the first two albums was a restriction on their discounting and advertising. There was none of the production, distribution, and promotion among the three albums normally associated with an integrated effort.