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Full-Text Articles in Law
Bias Arbitrage, Amitai Aviram
Bias Arbitrage, Amitai Aviram
Washington and Lee Law Review
The production of law-including the choice of a law's subject matter, the timing of its enactment and the manner in which it is publicized and perceived by the public-is significantly driven by an extra-legal market in which politicians and private parties compete over the opportunity to engage in bias arbitrage. Bias arbitrage is the extraction of private benefits through actions that identify and mitigate discrepancies between actual risks and the public's perception of the same risks. Politicians arbitrage these discrepancies by enacting laws that address the misperceived risk and contain a "placebo effect"--a counter-bias that attempts to offset the pre-existing …
The Failure Of Economic Interpretations Of The Law Of Contract Damages, Nathan B. Oman
The Failure Of Economic Interpretations Of The Law Of Contract Damages, Nathan B. Oman
Washington and Lee Law Review
The law of contracts is complex but remarkably stable. What we lack is a widely accepted interpretation of that law as embodying a coherent set of normative choices. Some scholars have suggested that either economic efficiency or personal autonomy provide unifying principles of contract law. These two approaches, however, seem incommensurable, which suggests that we must reject at least one of them in order to have a coherent theory. This Article dissents from this view and has a simple thesis: Economic accounts of the current doctrine governing contract damages have failed, but efficiency arguments remain key to any adequate theory …