Litigation as rent seeking

Litigation aims at resolving conflicts. In this chapter we survey the law and economics literature on litigation to illustrate the scope of application of rent-seeking models and their analytical power in the study of law and procedural issues of litigation, including applications in adversarial and inquisitorial procedures, fee-shifting, consolidation and bifurcation of trials and tort liability. We present a unified model of rent seeking recasting the various perspectives in the literature, to illustrate the power of rent-seeking models in addressing different dimensions of substantive and procedural legal problems.