Special insurance systems for motor vehicle liability

Automobile insurance is a compulsory purchase for most drivers in Europe and the United States. Obviously, this obligation raises concerns about affordability and availability. To mitigate such problems, in most legal systems special facilities have been created, either by policymakers or by insurance companies, to deal with risks that are very difficult to insure or are even considered uninsurable on the commercial market. We (1) provide an overview of special schemes in several European countries, (2) examine the potential advantages of reducing the number of uninsured drivers and investigate the influence of the special schemes on the decision of individuals to drive (un)insured, (3) examine the consequences of these schemes for the incentives of drivers and (4) discuss the social costs of the special schemes

The scope of criminal law and criminal sanctions: An economic view and policy implications

This paper considers why some harm-generating activities are controlled by criminal law and criminal sanctions while others are subject to some other mechanism such as civil law, administrative law, regulation or the tax system. It looks at the question from the perspective of the law and economics approach. We seek to identify the comparative benefits of using the criminal law relative to other enforcement mechanisms and – more broadly – why certain specific behaviours are criminalized. The paper argues that an economic approach emphasizing the relative merits of alternative legal instruments for bringing about harm reduction can provide an explanation for a number of recent legal developments. It argues also that the willingness of legislators to combine the use of sanctions traditionally used in one area of the law with sanctions from other areas is more readily explicable in economic terms than in other terms.