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To understand how people behave in an uncertain world - and to make viable recommendations about how the law should try to shape that behavior - legal scholars must employ a model or theory of decision making. Only with an understanding of how people are likely to respond to legal rules can legal scholars, judges, legislators, and regulators craft rules that are likely to encourage desirable behavior and discourage undesirable behavior. Rather than rely on rational choice theory, behavioral law and economics scholars (or legal decision theorists) have turned to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's "prospect theory" to inform their analyses of law and legal behavior. Prospect theory contains several empirical propositions relevant to legal analysis, but this paper focuses primarily on prospect theory's insight that people often make risk-averse choices when selecting between "gains" and risk-seeking choices when selecting between "losses." The paper surveys efforts in the legal literature to use this insight to inform the way legal scholars think about law and behavior in several doctrinal areas. The paper acknowledges some limitations associated with this work (e.g., external validity, differences in individual decision making, differences in group vs. individual decision making), but it concludes that prospect theory is nonetheless a valuable tool for legal scholars and policy makers.

Judges, scholars, and commentators decry inconsistent areas of judicially created policy. This could hurt courts' policy making efficacy, so why do judges allow it to happen? I show judicially-created policy can become inconsistent when judges explain rules in more abstract terms than they decide cases. To do so, I expand standard case-space models of judicial decision making to account for relationships between specific facts and broader doctrinal dimensions. This model of judicial decision making as a process of multi-step reasoning reveals that preference aggregation in such a context can lead to inconsistent collegial rules. I also outline a class of preference configurations on collegial courts (i.e., multi-member courts) in which this problem cannot arise. These results have implications for several areas of inquiry in judicial politics such as models of principal-agent relationships in judicial hierarchies and empirical research utilizing case facts as predictor variables.

Abstract
The condition of liberty which Sen used in his famous theorem on the impossibility of the Paretian liberal was defined in terms of individual preferences. The preference-based approach has been the subject of much criticism, which led to the evolution of the game-theoretic analysis of rights. In this approach no references to individual preferences are made. Two questions are examined in this paper: how can different types of right be distinguished within a game-theoretic setting, and how do rights come into existence? These questions are addressed on the basis of ideas originating from legal theory. The discussion shows that an analysis of rights should take account of the whole legal system of which a legal norm forms part. Furthermore, it reveals that preferences should be re-introduced into the formal study of individual rights.

What explains the success of criminal prosecutions against former Latin American officials accused of human rights violations? Why did some judiciaries evolve from unresponsive bureaucracies into protectors of victim rights? Using a theory of judicial action inspired by sociological institutionalism, this book argues that this was the result of deep transformations in the legal preferences of judges and prosecutors. Judicial actors discarded long-standing positivist legal criteria, historically protective of conservative interests, and embraced doctrines grounded in international human rights law, which made possible innovative readings of constitutions and criminal codes. Litigants were responsible for this shift in legal visions by activating informal mechanisms of ideational change and providing the skills necessary to deal with complex and unusual cases. Through an in-depth exploration of the interactions between judges, prosecutors and human rights lawyers in three countries, the book asks how changing ideas about the law and standards of adjudication condition the exercise of judicial power.

This report presents, first, a brief history, economic rationale, and legal background leading to the establishment of the Generalized system of preferences.

In Denmark, applications of operations research in healthcare planning is scarce. Nurse rostering is no exception and at most hospitals it is conducted manually with no assistance from automated approaches. This project is ongoing research into the possibilities of developing and implementing a nurse rostering system in Danish hospitals where the allocation of resources is optimized using methods from operations research. The system should not only be able to generate rosters which are feasible w.r.t. Danish legal agreements, but also include various preferences in the optimization. Due to the Danish legislation, the problem formulation differs from previous research on nurse rostering. The project is in its early phases, where the scope and the formulation of the problem are being adjusted in collaboration with a few planners and with focus on their priorities. The problem is a mixture of selfscheduling and preference scheduling, where the nurses request shifts and days off based on three different priority categories. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective MIP model which is used to find a schedule minimizing the violation of preferences, both general preferences from the planners as well as individual requests from nurses. The goal is to make the system flexible to be applied to different wards, and the long-term vision is that the system will be implemented throughout multiple hospitals in Denmark.