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Workshop Draft For Reading The Mind Of The Private Law - 1995, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

Eventually, I hope to produce an article or book called "Reading the Mind of the Private Law." In this project I hope to do three connected things: to simplify the underlying patterns of the common law and associated statutes to make them more comprehensible to newcomers; to provide a more accurately descriptive and more normatively attractive' story' than Posner's notion of value-maximization; and to make sophisticated lawyers' understanding of legal patterns more complete by including an explicit focus on benefits. (Traditional jurisprudence focuses more on harms than on benefits; even the practitioners of economic analysis, which technically speaking should be …