Academic books usually contain a scholarly apparatus--footnotes, case cites for a law book, sometimes mathematics, in the case of textbooks problems and (sometimes) answers. This apparatus gets in the way of simply reading the book. To solve that problem, I have moved the apparatus to cyberspace. Hence this web page.
The left-hand frame is the table of contents; click on the number of the chapter you want to look at. The top frame lists the pages in the selected chapter; click on a page to see its image. The image looks just like the page in the book. The only difference is that the icons are live; if you click on one you will see the additional material it refers to.
Most chapters also have a link to a collection of problems, some of them with answers. Most originated as exam problems for courses on the economic analysis of law. Hopefully some readers will find them useful as a way of testing how well they understand the material.
For the benefit of readers who wish to be able to read the notes when not connected to the net, I have also provided a printable version in several formats.
Readers who would like to know more about me may want to take a look at my home page. Readers who would like to propose additional material for the web page, or want to argue with it or the text, are invited to email me.
Text in red represents notes to myself about additional material to be added. Feel free to make suggestions.
David Friedman
3/26/2000
Many of the points made here were contributed by early readers of the manuscript. I am especially grateful to Richard Posner for correcting a considerable number of my mistaken or incomplete views on legal questions. Neither he or anyone other than myself is responsible for such errors as remain.
The icons in the book correspond to the situation at the time the book was produced. In some cases, a book or article that was unavailable online, and so represented as a cite rather than online text, may become available later, in which case (assuming I notice) I will add a link to it. In other cases, I have discovered something that should have been marked as an icon in the book, but was not--and added it to the web page. Such new icons, present on the web page but not the book, are colored gold.
In order to do an adequate job of producing this web page, including all of the case cites, out of my own head, I would have to be an expert on almost all of the traditional core subjects of the law. I know at least two people who qualify--oddly enough, they share a first name--but I am not one of them. I have instead relied heavily on secondary sources for cases and descriptions. The three most important are:
Dukeminier, Jesse and Krier, James, Property, 3d edn., Little, Brown and Co. 1993.
Epstein, Richard, Cases and Materials on Torts 5th edn., Little, Brown and Co. 1990.
Posner, Richard, Economic Analysis of Law, 5th edn., Little, Brown and Co. 1998.