Law Commons^™

Endowment Effects In Chimpanzees, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan, Susan P. Lambeth, Mary Catherine Mareno, Amanda S. Richardson, Steven Schapiro

Owen Jones

Human behavior is not always consistent with standard rational choice predictions. The much-investigated variety of apparent deviations from rational choice predictions provides a promising arena for the merger of economics and biology. Although little is known about the extent to which other species also exhibit these seemingly irrational patterns of human decision-making and choice behavior, similarities across species would suggest a common evolutionary root to the phenomena.

The present study investigated whether chimpanzees exhibit an endowment effect, a seemingly paradoxical behavior in which humans tend to value a good they have just come to possess more than they would have …

Law, Biology, And Property: A New Theory Of The Endowment Effect, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan

Owen Jones

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially increased predictive power concerning, various psychological traits relevant to law. This Article describes an experiment that explores that context.

The paradoxical psychological bias known as the endowment effect puzzles economists, skews market behavior, impedes efficient exchange of goods and rights, and thereby poses important problems for law. Although the effect is known to vary widely, there are at …

Law And Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones, Timothy H. Goldsmith

Owen Jones

Society uses law to encourage people to behave differently than they would behave in the absence of law. This fundamental purpose makes law highly dependent on sound understandings of the multiple causes of human behavior. The better those understandings, the better law can achieve social goals with legal tools. In this Article, Professors Jones and Goldsmith argue that many long held understandings about where behavior comes from are rapidly obsolescing as a consequence of developments in the various fields constituting behavioral biology. By helping to refine law's understandings of behavior's causes, they argue, behavioral biology can help to improve law's …

Econometrics In The Courtroom, Daniel L. Rubinfeld

Daniel L. Rubinfeld

No abstract provided.

Tailoring Legal Protection For Computer Software, Peter S. Menell

Peter Menell

No abstract provided.

Public Actors In Private Markets: Toward A Developmental Finance State, Robert Hockett, Saule Omarova

Saule T. Omarova

The recent financial crisis brought into sharp relief fundamental questions about the social function and purpose of the financial system, including its relation to the “real” economy. This Article argues that, to answer these questions, we must recapture a distinctively American view of the proper relations among state, financial market, and development. This programmatic vision – captured in what we call a “developmental finance state” – is based on three key propositions: (1) that economic and social development is not an “end-state” but a continuing national policy priority; (2) that the modalities of finance are the most potent means of …

Taking Distribution Seriously, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

It is common for legal theorists and policy analysts to think and communicate mainly in maximizing terms. What is less common is for them to notice that each time we speak explicitly of socially maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing another thing and equalizing yet another thing. We also, moreover, effectively define ourselves and our fellow citizens by reference to that which we equalize; for it is in virtue of the latter that our social welfare formulations treat us as “counting” for purposes of socially aggregating and maximizing. To attend systematically to the inter-translatability of maximization language on …

The Shadows Behind The Law: An Overview Of The Legal System In Ghana, Prince Opoku Agyemang

Prince Opoku Agyemang

Contract Law And Modern Economic Theory, Daniel A. Farber

Daniel A Farber

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Capital And Its Discontents: Conversations With Radical Thinkers In A Time Of Tumult By Sasha Lilly (Pm Press, 2011), Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

No abstract provided.

If Ethanol Is The Answer, What Is The Question, Peter Z. Grossman

Peter Z. Grossman

Since 2005, in the face of rising oil and gasoline prices, many Americans have looked to plant-based fuels, particularly ethanol, as the "answer" to our energy dilemmas. Section III examines the issues connected specifically to ethanol, how market forces as well as government subsidies have worked to make corn-based ethanol economically viable at times, why that viability has been lost in recent months even with subsidies, and further, why ethanol from corn on the scale the legislation demands is impractical. Clearly it would be technically possible to produce the mandated 15 billion gallons of ethanol, and distilling capacity will nearly …

September 11th, John Maynard Keynes, Kenneth J. Arrow, And Me: The Nexus, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins, Ph.D.

Jog, Jogászat És Jogtudomány Hatása Weber Módszertani Nézeteire [The Impact Of Law, Lawyering, And Jurisprudence On Weber’S Methodological Views], Péter Cserne

Péter Cserne

Law and legal science have played a significant, but hitherto underestimated role in Weber's life, both professional and non-academic. Trained as a lawyer, he drew upon an existing vocabulary of legal scholarship and adapted from it, more or less implicitly a large number of conceptual and methodological tools for his sociological projects. The goal of this paper is to identify and evaluate these complex links between Weberian sociology and contemporary legal scholarship, with special emphasis on Jhering's and Jellinek's theories. (This paper is a significantly revised Hungarian version of my 2005 English language essay on Weber.)

Post-Tefra Holding Company Strategies, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins, Ph.D.