Talking law and economics at ETH Zurich

With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being considered for tasks once thought to be uniquely human—including legal interpretation. The idea of “AI judges” suggests appealing possibilities: consistent, fast, and ostensibly unbiased answers to legal questions. But how reliable are these models? Can their judgments truly be trusted? And do they...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog Series, Prof. Murat C. Mungan (Texas A&M University) discusses his paper "Symmetry, Presumptions, and the Judges Design" with Karol Rutkowski (ETH Zurich). In his work, Murat C. Mungan discusses an important assumption underlying a popular empirical method used in social sciences, namely average monotonicity, and shows the conditions under which this a...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Prof. Berk Ustun (University of California San Diego) discusses his paper "Prediction without Preclusion: Recourse Verification with Reachable Sets" with Benjamin Kohler (ETH Zurich). In their work, Berk Ustun and his co-authors investigate how machine learning models in high-stakes settings, such as lending and hiring, assign "f...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Mitu Gulati (University of Virginia) and Karol Rutkowski (ETH Zurich) discuss "Swiss Cheese Contracts", a topic drawn from Gulati's new book "Contract Hazards: Lawyers and Their Landmines", co-authored with Stephen J. Choi (NYU) and Robert E. Scott (Columbia University). In the study "Swiss Cheese Contracts: The Costs of Creative Lawyering", Pr...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Raquel De Haro (ETH Zurich) interviews Anu Bradford (Columbia University) about her recent paper “The False Choice Between Digital Regulation and Innovation.” Prof. Bradford is the Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization, and a leading scholar on the EU’s regulatory power and digital regulation. She coined the term “Bruss...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Prof. Francesco Parisi (University of Minnesota & University of Bologna) discusses his paper "Rewarding Failure" with Gianmarco Torchetti (ETH Zurich). In their work, Parisi and his co-authors Alice Guerra and Andres Sawicki challenge the one-sided incentive structure of intellectual property law, which rewards only successful inn...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Prof. Manisha Padi (University of California, Berkeley) discusses her study "The Rise of Nonbanks in Servicing Household Debt" with Karol Rutkowski (ETH Zurich). In their work, Padi and co-authors study the effects of capital regulation focusing on the case of the market for mortgage servicing rights (MSRs) and the Basel III regulatio...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Prof. Kevin Cope (University of Virginia) discusses his paper "An Expert-Sourced Measure of Judicial Ideology" with Benjamin Kohler (ETH Zurich). In his work, Kevin Cope investigates how to measure judicial ideology and how this construct influences legal decisions. He introduces the Jurist-Derived Judicial Ideology Scores (JuDJIS), a...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Prof. Jacob Goldin (University of Chicago) discusses his paper "Work Requirements and Child Tax Benefits" with Noah Fehr (ETH Zürich). In his work, Jacob Goldin examines the trade-offs between targeting child tax benefits to the most vulnerable families and preserving incentives to work. Alongside his co-authors, Goldin uses administr...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Daniel Hemel (New York University School of Law) discusses his paper "Law and the New Dynamic Public Finance" with Luca Baltensperger (ETH Zurich). In his work, Prof. Hemel explores how insights from the new dynamic public finance can inform legal policy. This framework challenges conventional wisdom in classical tax theory, offering...

In this episode of the CLE vlog series, Raquel De Haro (ETH Zurich) interviews Professor Nick Feamster (University of Chicago) about his studies on compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Prof. Feamster’s research examines how businesses implement opt-out options for data sharing and explores the use of "dark patterns”. His findings reveal that many websites do not fully comply...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Libertad González (Universitat Pompeu Fabrica and Barcelona School of Economics) discusses her paper on the effect of paternity leave on early child development with Claudia Marangon (ETH Zurich). For their study, Prof. González, Prof. Lídia Farré (IAE-CSIC and BSE), Prof. Claudia Hupkau (CUNEF Universidad and CEP (LSE)), and Prof. Jenifer Ruiz...

Fines are efficient and widely adopted criminal sanctions due to their low enforcement burdens and the wealth transfer from offenders to society. Among the various fining regimes that have emerged, day fines have been proposed as an optimal way to ensure equality across social classes, yet questions remain about their effectiveness and the fulfilment of their promises in practice. In this episode...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast series, Prof. Paul Ohm (Georgetown University) and Prof. Filippo Lancieri (Georgetown University, formerly ETH Zurich) discuss Prof. Ohm's study on the pathways for shaping generative AI, with a special focus on fine-tuning. In his study, Prof. Ohm explains the differences between pretraining, fine-tuning, in-context learning, and input and output...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast series, Prof. Giorgio Zanarone (HEC Lausanne) and Karol Rutkowski (ETH Zurich) talk about Prof. Zanarone's recent paper "Relationships in the Wild: How Institutions Affect the Governance of Firms". In their study, Zanarone and his co-authors Gani Aldashev (ULB) and Heikki Rantakari (Rochester) develop a relational contracting model to des...

In 1883, the US Supreme Court declared that no one is above the law, emphasizing that all government officials must obey it. This principle, widely accepted in contemporary legal systems, asserts that politicians, like everyone else, should not be immune from prosecution. Unlike for everybody else, though, the decision to prosecute a politician, may be influenced by partisan politics. In this epis...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast Series, Prof. Luigi Zingales (University of Chicago) discusses the broader topic of "Sharehoder Democracy" with Dr. Philine Widmer (ETH Zurich). References: Eleonora Broccardo – University of Trento Oliver Hart – Harvard University Luigi Zingales – University of Chicago Exit vs. Voice European Corporate Governance Institute – Finance Working...

In this episode of the CLE vlog & podcast series, Prof. Kevin Davis (New York University) discusses his study "Did the Global South Have Their Say on EU Supply Chain Regulation?" with Luca Baltensperger (ETH Zurich). Prof. Davis' study (joint with Roy Germano and Lauren E. May from NYU) uses data from the EU’s ‘Have Your Say’ platform to examine how actors from the Global South r...

In this episode of the CLE Vlog & Podcast series, Amit Zac (University of Amsterdam) and Filippo Lancieri (ETH Zurich) discuss Prof. Zac’s study "The Court Speaks, But Who Listens? Automated Compliance Review of the GDPR", which is an empirical analysis of the mobile applications’ response to the famous European Court of Justice ’Schrems II’ decision in the EU. In July 2020, the Euro...

In this episode of the CLE vlog & podcast series, Prof. Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn) and Prof. Stefan Bechtold (ETH Zurich) discuss Engel's recent study on the German Constitutional Court. The latter has powers that are no weaker than the powers of the US Supreme Court. Justices are openly selected by the political parties. Nonetheless, publi...

In this episode of the CLE vlog & podcast series, Christopher S. Yoo (University of Pennsylvania) and Christophe Gösken (ETH Zurich) talk about Prof. Yoo's study "An Economic Analysis of the Right to be Forgotten". The so-called “right to be forgotten” has gained prominence under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar regulatory frameworks have...

For a long time, scholars have been classifying most legal systems around the world as falling within one of two inherently different categories: common or civil law systems. While the former (common law), rooted in England and practiced also in the US, involves precedent or deference to previously published judicial opinion; the latter (civil law), practiced in continental Europe and elsewhere in...

For years, academic experts have championed the widespread adoption of the “Fama-French” factors in legal settings. Factor models are commonly used to perform valuations, performance evaluation and event studies across a wide variety of contexts, many of which rely on data provided by Professor Kenneth French. Yet these data are beset by a problem that the experts themselves did not understand: Wi...

Disinformation is proliferating on the internet, and platforms are responding by attaching warnings to content. There is little evidence, however, that these warnings help users identify or avoid disinformation. In this episode of the Center for Law & Economics' vlog & podcast series, Prof. Jonathan Mayer (Princeton) discusses the study "Adapting Security Warnings to Counter Onlin...

In this episode of the CLE's vlog & podcast series, Prof. Henry E. Smith (Harvard) discusses his essays "Putting the Equity Back into Intellectual Property Remedies" and "Equity as Meta-Law" with Christophe Gösken (ETH Zurich). In his articles, Henry Smith argues that equity and related parts of the law solve complex and uncertain problems — including interdependent behavior and misuses of leg...