Research

Court congestion is among society’s oldest legal problems; protections from it are enshrined in constitutions around the world. This paper uses publicly available data on the duration of millions of criminal court cases over the course of two decades across Canadian provinces to analyze the performance of the criminal justice system using queueing theory. Our new approach to estimating the delay of criminal trials appropriately includes the time from the point the charges are laid to first appearance, which is not available in raw data. We find that the queue sizes and wait times are growing in many provinces, suggesting that the criminal justice system is approaching, or perhaps beyond, capacity. Using several different time series specifications, we find that the utilization rate and model-implied queue size co-move positively with the population in pretrial custody. The results suggest that court congestion, as measured by statistics from queueing theory, has explanatory power for the rising population in pretrial custody.

This paper develops a model in which housing incurs a property damage for which the tenant must sue in order to be made whole. The model is analyzed under both market rents and rent control regimes, as well as for tenants with limited wealth, bilateral (tenant) investment, coinsurance, and rent abatement. The model facilitates the evaluation of several policies, such as rent control, landlord-tenant laws, income redistribution, tenant insurance, and rent abatement. The model makes several predictions which are consistent with empirical findings in housing economics, such as how and why rent control decreasing investment in maintenance, why the poor occupy housing of worse condition, and how laws shifting liability onto the landlord increase the quality of housing for poor tenants as well as increase rent prices. It also nests classic hypotheses, such as the Calabresi’s efficiency of strict liability rules and the least cost avoider, in addition to clarifications on Friedman’s prediction that rent control decreases investment.

We study the consequences of landlord-tenant laws on quality and prices in the rental housing market. We use the staggered introduction of Canadian Residential Tenancy Acts to study the consequences of a landlord-tenant reform that reduced tenants' litigation costs and improved their bargaining power through mandatory contractual terms. To do so, we employ a the difference-in-differences approach to estimate the average treatment effect on a repeated-cross section of households, controlling for income and family structure in five cities. The estimates imply that the reform led to a decline of 2.2 percentage points in the probability of a major defect, with no measurable effect on rent prices or homeownership rates. The average treatment effects are concentrated within families with children who face greater costs to moving in response to property damage and are least sensitive to changes in the vacancy rate. The results are consistent with a stylized model in which a reduction in litigation costs allows the tenant to more cheaply recover on damages when moving costs are high, with second-generation rent controls limiting increases in rent prices charged by the landlord.

This Essay develops an economic approach to statutory and contractual interpretation. The economic approach to interpretation understands "things" as inherently economic objects that drafters intend to specify to include close-to-perfect substitutes or similar fairly priced items by the market. Several difficult cases involving exclusivity clauses, the exchange of land, and options contracts are resolved using economic and financial theory. The economic approach offers an alternative to the dictionary that offers more pleasing answers than the extant approach taken by courts which can easily arrive at incorrect conclusions. The economic approach has applications to contractual interpretation, but also areas of public law, such as competition law, taxation law, and international trade law.

Admission of surreptitious interceptions done by non-State agents into evidence in criminal proceedings constitutes a State action which engages the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. As a result, a host of criminal statutes which allow for disclosure in criminal proceedings, such as parts of s. 193(2)(a) of the Criminal Code and 720 ILCS 5/14-3(i), are unconstitutional as-applied. The new section 8 jurisprudence in Lambert and Bykovets emphasizes that the violation of a reasonable expectation of privacy constitutes a “search” and the act of the police to possess such evidence constitutes a “seizure” within the meaning of s. 8 of the Charter. A reasonable and probable grounds or probable cause standard is constitutionally required for admissibility of warrantless surreptitious interceptions in which not all parties consent and there exists a reasonable expectation of privacy. The remedy of inadmissibility is supported on grounds of privacy, for which the tort remedy may be inappropriate, and, somewhat counterintuitively, free expression, so as to protect private speech which facilitates democratic processes, a robust epistemic marketplace, and self-expression. Such a broad exclusionary rule may require exemptions to pass constitutional muster, as it violates ss. 7 and 11(d) of the Charter for defense offers, making exemptions for officer-involved interactions and exigent circumstances, too, constitutionally required.