Law Commons^™

It’S A Trap: A New Economic Model Addressing American Public Education, Nikhil A. Gulati

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note will argue that, when looking at the quality of a school district, there is some theoretical threshold that determines whether the use of local property tax and zoning by a local government will be effective in increasing the quality of the locality’s schools. This theoretical threshold is conceptually akin to the basic economic idea of a poverty trap. If a locality’s schools are above this quality threshold, the corresponding local government will be able to effectively utilize property taxes and zoning to increase the quality of its schools. However, if it is below the threshold, the local government …

The Market As Negotiation, Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff, Matthew T. Bodie

Notre Dame Law Review

Our economic system counts on markets to allocate most of our societal resources. The law often treats markets as discrete entities, with a native intelligence and structure that provides clear answers to questions about prices and terms. In reality, of course, markets are much messier—they are agglomerations of negotiations by individual parties. Despite theoretical and empirical work on markets and on negotiation, legal scholars have largely overlooked the connection between the two areas in considering how markets are constructed and regulated.

This Article brings together scholarship in law, economics, sociology, and psychology to better understand the role that negotiation plays …

Faith, Law, And Love: Peg Brinig's Legacy, Stephanos Bibas

Notre Dame Law Review

The central question in Peg Brinig’s work is how the law can help intimate associations to raise healthy kids. She pursues this theme through a variety of inquiries, ranging from parochial schools in big-city neighborhoods to covenant-marriage laws in Louisiana. Her answers depend on context, varying with how close each social actor or institution is to the process of raising children. But nearly all her recommendations seek to foster permanent, loving, involved social environments.

Following Brinig’s lead, I’ll celebrate her work by highlighting some of the answers she offers in three different social contexts. In Part I, I’ll explore her …

The Place Of Empirical Studies, F.H. Buckley

Notre Dame Law Review

It was chance that brought Peg Brinig to George Mason University School of Law, and curiosity that took her to a law-and-economics and then to empirical research. She realized that only the curious would be able to keep up to new things, and that law teaching, not journalism, was the profession of the curious.

At the time, it took not only curiosity, but also a certain measure of courage to embark on law and economics. Traditional legal scholars correctly surmised that it would shake up the discipline, and that is never a pleasant experience. Conservatives who were fond of saying …

A Consumer Guide To Empirical Family Law, June Carbone

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article will consider the framework for empirical work on family law, arguing that the failure to ask more sophisticated questions at the beginning of the research has limited its effectiveness. In this sense, Professor Peg Brinig’s work stands out for the creativity of the questions she has asked, her exploration of underutilized databases, and her work’s potential to serve as a foundation for a new paradigm for the integration of empirical work into family law theory.

This Article will discuss the way that theory—and the creation of discourses associated with it—informs empirical research. First, it will maintain that the …

Property Rights In Children, Barry E. Adler, Alexis A. Alvarez

Notre Dame Law Review

In 1978, Dr. Elisabeth Landes and then-Professor, later-Judge Richard Posner, published The Economics of the Baby Shortage. The article openly discussed how economic analysis can address the allocation of babies available for adoption. The ideas expressed in the article were widely denounced as an inhumane commodification of children, something tolerable only in the twisted minds of academic authors. Despite the backlash, an odd thing happened in the more than four decades since Landes and Posner wrote on this topic: their ideas began to take hold. Today, almost all states in the United States permit, in some form, the contractual …

The Institutional Economics Of Marriage: A Reinterpretation Of Margaret Brinig's Contribution To Family Law, Douglas W. Allen

Notre Dame Law Review

Margaret (Peg) Brinig has made a massive contribution to family law over the course of the past thirty-five years. Spanning the two fields of economics and law, her views have evolved over time to ones that see family as a matter of covenant. The concept of a covenant is mostly unknown in the modern secular world and is absent in economics. Without (hopefully) changing Brinig’s meaning, I reinterpret her work and argue that her concept of a covenant is equivalent to the economist’s understanding of an institution. The goal of reinterpreting her work in light of institutional economics is to …

Bounded Rationality And The Theory Of Property, Oren Bar-Gill, Nicola Persico

Notre Dame Law Review

Strong, property rule protection—implemented via injunctions, criminal sanctions, and supercompensatory damages—is a defining aspect of property. What is the theoretical justification for property rule protection? The conventional answer has to do with the alleged shortcomings of the weaker liability rule alternative: it is widely held that liability rule protection—implemented via compensatory damages—would interfere with efficient exchange and jeopardize the market system. We show that these concerns are overstated and that exchange efficiency generally obtains in a liability rule regime—but only when the parties are perfectly rational. When the standard rationality assumption is replaced with a more realistic bounded rationality assumption, …

The Sharing Economy As An Equalizing Economy, John O. Mcginnis

Notre Dame Law Review

Economic equality is often said to be the key problem of our time. But information technology dematerializes the world in ways that are helpful to the ninety-nine percent, because information can be shared. This Article looks at how one fruit of the information revolution—the sharing economy—has important equalizing features on both its supply and demand sides. First, on the supply side, the intermediaries in the sharing economy, like Airbnb and Uber, allow owners of housing and cars to monetize their most important capital assets. The gig aspect of this economy creates spot markets in jobs that have flexible hours and …

Privacy And Markets: A Love Story, Ryan Calo

Notre Dame Law Review

After defining terms, Part I lays out the law and economics case against privacy, including its basis in economic thought more generally. Part II canvasses the literature responding to economic skepticism in the privacy law literature. Some scholars mount an insider critique, accepting the basic tenets of economics but suggesting that privacy actually increases efficiency in some contexts, or else noting that markets themselves will yield privacy under the right conditions. Others critique economic thinking from the outside. Markets “unravel” privacy by penalizing it, degrade privacy by treating it as just another commodity, or otherwise interfere with the values or …

The Revolving Door, Wentong Zheng

Notre Dame Law Review

The revolving door between the government and the private sector has long been presumed to lead to the capture of regulators by industry interests. A growing body of empirical literature, however, either finds no conclusive evidence of a capture effect or finds evidence of an opposite effect that the revolving door indeed results in more aggressive, not less aggressive, regulatory actions. To account for these incongruous results, scholars have formulated and tested a new “human-capital” theory positing that revolving-door regulators have incentives to be more aggressive toward the regulated industry as a way of signaling their qualifications to prospective industry …

Banking And The Social Contract, Mehrsa Baradaran

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article asserts that there are three major tenets of the social contract: (1) safety and soundness, (2) consumer protection, and (3) access to credit. Regulators can and should require banks to meet standards in these areas to benefit society even if these measures reasonably reduce bank profits. Implicit in the social contract is the idea that each party must give up something in the exchange. This Article provides policymakers not only the appropriate narrative and justifications needed to frame their regulatory philosophy, but it also provides important textual support from the most prominent acts of banking legislation to give …