TY  - BOOK
AU  - Landes,William M.
AU  - Posner,Richard A.
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Legal Precedent: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 1976///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - August 1976; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w0146
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w0146
ER  -