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Minding The Gaps: Fairness, Welfare, And The Constitutive Structure Of Distributive Assessment, Robert C. Hockett Sep 2006

Minding The Gaps: Fairness, Welfare, And The Constitutive Structure Of Distributive Assessment, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Despite over a century’s disputation and attendant opportunity for clarification, the field of inquiry now loosely labeled “welfare economics” (WE) remains surprisingly prone to foundational confusions. The same holds of work done by many practitioners of WE’s influential offshoot, normative “law and economics” (LE).

A conspicuous contemporary case of confusion turns up in recent discussion concerning “fairness versus welfare.” The very naming of this putative dispute signals a crude category error. “Welfare” denotes a proposed object of distribution. “Fairness” describes and appropriate pattern of distribution. Welfare itself is distributed fairly or unfairly. “Fairness versus welfare” is analytically on all fours …


Identity And Market For Loyalties Theories: The Case For Free Information Flow In Insurgent Iraq, Paul D. Callister Jan 2006

Identity And Market For Loyalties Theories: The Case For Free Information Flow In Insurgent Iraq, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

When monopoly control over the flow of information is lost, the unavoidable consequence is destabilization. Information flow through a society can be understood as a market - not a market exchanging cash for goods, but loyalty for identity. Hence the market is called the Market for Loyalties - so labeled by an economics of information theory first developed by Prof. Monroe Price, of Cardozo Law School, and Director of the Howard M. Squadron Program in Law, Media and Society, to explain government regulation of radio, TV, cable and satellite broadcasting.

In post-invasion Iraq, Saddam Hussein lost or monopoly control over …