Private Lawdrafting, Intellectual Property, and Public Laws
Public lawmakers have inadequate and misaligned incentives to engage in legal innovation. Private lawmaking is offered as a potential solution to this problem. However, private lawmaking faces a dilemma: In order to be effective, the cost-reducing standard forms produced by private lawdrafters need to be publicly enacted. However, enactment as law eliminates the intellectual property rights that are essential to properly motivate the private lawdrafters to produce such forms. As a result, private lawdrafters will have inadequate and misaligned incentives to engage in legal innovation that would provide widespread benefits. Absent some mechanism to allow the private lawdrafter a way to appropriate the gains from his investment in cost reducing legal innovation, the promise of private lawmaking may be minimal.
An Economic Analysis of Uniform State Laws
Uniform laws proposed by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) cover virtually every area of state law. Yet there is no economic analysis of the NCCUSL's activities. This article addresses this gap in the literature by applying economic analysis to evaluate and explain the NCCUSL's activities and their success in state legislatures. We find that states efficiently sort between NCCUSL proposals in that they tend to adopt these proposals in which a cost-benefit analysis suggests that uniformity is efficient. Nevertheless, the NCCUSL promulgates many laws in which uniformity is not efficient, and the NCCUSL's influence causes some of these proposals to be adopted. Our results suggest that, in many cases, reliance on federal law or on centralized lawmaking bodies such as the NCCUSL to produce uniformity may be both unnecessary and perverse.
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.