Law Commons^™

Climbing To 1011: Globalization, Digitization, Shareholder Capitalism And The Summits Of Contemporary Wealth, David A. Westbrook

Journal Articles

While we may find many sorts of inequality in the United States and elsewhere, this essay is about the specific form of inequality exemplified by Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, that is, the Himalayan summits of contemporary wealth, mostly in the United States. Such wealth results from the confluence of three historical developments.

First, the social processes referred to under the rubric of “globalization” have created vast markets. A dominant position in such markets leads not only to great wealth, but the elimination of peers. Since there are few such markets, relatively significant wealth is possessed by very few people. …

The Law And Economics Of Redistribution, Matthew Dimick

Journal Articles

Should legal rules be used to redistribute income? Or should income taxation be the exclusive means for reducing income inequality? This article reviews the legal scholarship on this question. First, it traces how the most widely cited argument in favor of using taxes exclusively--Kaplow & Shavell's (1994) double-distortion argument--evolved from previous debates about whether legal rules could even be redistributive and whether law and economics should be concerned exclusively with efficiency or with distribution as well. Next, it surveys the responses to the double-distortion argument. These responses appear to have had only limited success in challenging the sturdy reputation of …

Models Of Other-Regarding Preferences And Redistribution, Matthew Dimick, David Rueda, Daniel Stegmueller

Journal Articles

Despite the increasing popularity of comparative work on other-regarding preferences, the implications of different models of altruism are not always fully understood. This article analyzes different theoretical approaches to altruism and explores what empirical conclusions we should draw from them, paying particular attention to models of redistribution preferences where inequality explicitly triggers other-regarding motives for redistribution. While the main contribution of this article is to clarify the conclusions of these models, we also illustrate the importance of their distinct implications by analyzing Western European data to compare among them. We draw on individual-level data from the European Social Survey fielded …

Personal Responsibility For Systemic Inequality, Martha T. Mccluskey

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 15 in Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law, Ugo Mattei & John D. Haskell, eds.

Equality has faded as a guiding ideal for legal theory and policy. An updated message of personal responsibility has helped rationalize economic policies fostering increased inequality and insecurity. In this revised message, economic “losers” should take personal responsibility not only for the harmful effects of their individual economic decisions, but also for the harmful effects of systemic failures beyond their individual control or action. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, this re-tooled message of personal responsibility promoted mass austerity in …