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Comment: The Future Of Behavioral Economic Analysis Of Law, Jennifer Arlen

Vanderbilt Law Review

Behavioral economic analysis of law presents an important challenge to conventional law and economics, strengthened in part by the fact that conventional law and economics is itself a behavioral approach to law. Indeed, conventional law and economics can be viewed as the first widely-adopted behavioral approach to law. A central contribution of Ronald Coase's pathbreaking article was the claim that one cannot determine the effect of a law by simply looking at the law itself--at the conduct the law requires. Instead, one must determine how people will respond to the law.' Legal rules, he argued, do not dictate behavior-they simply …