Law Commons^™

Intuitions Of Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Robert Kurzban

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent work reveals, contrary to wide-spread assumptions, remarkably high levels of agreement about how to rank order, by blameworthiness, wrongs that involve physical harms, takings of property, or deception in exchanges. In The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726) we proposed a new explanation for these unexpectedly high levels of agreement.

Elsewhere in this issue, Professors Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman offer a critique of our views, to which we reply here. Our reply clarifies a number of important issues, such as the interconnected roles that culture, variation, and evolutionary processes play in generating intuitions of punishment.

Endowment Effects In Chimpanzees, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan, Susan P. Lambeth, Mary Catherine Mareno, Amanda S. Richardson, Steven Schapiro

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Human behavior is not always consistent with standard rational choice predictions. The much-investigated variety of apparent deviations from rational choice predictions provides a promising arena for the merger of economics and biology. Although little is known about the extent to which other species also exhibit these seemingly irrational patterns of human decision-making and choice behavior, similarities across species would suggest a common evolutionary root to the phenomena.

The present study investigated whether chimpanzees exhibit an endowment effect, a seemingly paradoxical behavior in which humans tend to value a good they have just come to possess more than they would have …

Law And Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones, Timothy H. Goldsmith

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Society uses law to encourage people to behave differently than they would behave in the absence of law. This fundamental purpose makes law highly dependent on sound understandings of the multiple causes of human behavior. The better those understandings, the better law can achieve social goals with legal tools. In this Article, Professors Jones and Goldsmith argue that many long held understandings about where behavior comes from are rapidly obsolescing as a consequence of developments in the various fields constituting behavioral biology. By helping to refine law's understandings of behavior's causes, they argue, behavioral biology can help to improve law's …

Proprioception, Non-Law, And Biolegal History, Owen D. Jones

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article explores several advantages of incorporating into law various insights from behavioral biology about how and why the brain works as it does. In particular, the Article explores the ways in which those insights can help illuminate the deep structure of human legal systems. That effort is termed "biolegal history."

Evolutionary Analysis In Law: Some Objections Considered, Owen D. Jones

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article appears in a special issue of the Brooklyn Law Review on DNA: Lessons from the Past - Problems for the Future. It first addresses why law needs insights from behavioral biology, and then identifies and responds to a variety of structural and conceptual barriers to such evolutionary analysis in law.