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University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Social welfare

Legal Studies

Publication Year

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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Perils Of Forgetting Fairness, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan Jan 2009

The Perils Of Forgetting Fairness, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Miscalculating Welfare, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan Mar 2008

Miscalculating Welfare, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

In their quest to maximize efficiency, law and economics scholars often produce novel, creative, and counterintuitive legal rules. Indeed, legal economists have argued for baby selling, against anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, and for insider trading. In this essay, we discuss some concerns about this form of legal scholarship that privileges the creative and counterintuitive over the fair, mundane, and intuitive. Drawing on a range of empirical evidence, this essay argues that the failure to include, and to give sufficient weight to, fairness preferences undermines legal economists' policy recommendations. Specifically, after setting forth three examples of this phenomenon, in the …