Law Commons^™

The Right To Attention, Jasper L. Tran

Indiana Law Journal

What marketing, contracts, and healthcare—specifically informed consent and mandatory ultrasounds—have in common is the right to attention from the information receiver. However, scholarship most often focuses on the communicator’s perspective (e.g., how much information the communicator discloses) or on the information itself, but surprisingly, not much on the receiver’s perspective.

This dearth of scholarship from the information receiver’s perspective is problematic, because the information receiver is often the “little guy” in the conversation. We own and are entitled to our attention because attention is a property right and part of our individual dignity. Yet advertisement companies and scam artists freely …

Collapsing Illusions: Standards For Setting Efficient Contract And Other Defaults, Steven J. Burton

Indiana Law Journal

In this Essay, Professor Burton analyzes and evaluates four commonly used standards for setting efficient default rules and standards. Based on two theoretical insights, he shows that three of them collapse upon analysis into the fourth, a Coasian standard that turns out to be a dead end. The theoretical upshot is that the Coase Theorem often is a good reason to use defaults rather than mandatory rules or standards. But neither the theorem nor reference to a transaction-costless world sustains particular defaults. To set an efficient default, the law should guide courts toward supplying terms that parties should have adopted …

Resolving Conflicts Over Scarce Resources: Private Versus Shared Ownership, W.C. Bunting

Marquette Law Review

This Article models private ownership as a conflict resolution mechanism and contends that for the Coase Theorem, as narrowly defined in this Article, to be consistent, private ownership must yield the Pareto- optimal use of scarce resources among all feasible conflict resolution mechanisms. Conflict over a scarce resource may be better resolved, however, by eliminating the possibility of private ownership and “forcing” disputing parties to share ownership of the contested resource. A corollary to the Coase Theorem is introduced which states: In the absence of transaction costs, the distribution of private and shared ownership is efficient. Further, assuming transaction costs …