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Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics
"Eggshell" Victims, Private Precautions, And The Societal Benefits Of Shifting Crime, Robert A. Mikos
"Eggshell" Victims, Private Precautions, And The Societal Benefits Of Shifting Crime, Robert A. Mikos
Michigan Law Review
Individuals spend billions of dollars every year on precautions to protect themselves from crime. Yet the legal academy has criticized many private precautions because they merely shift crime onto other, less guarded citizens, rather than reduce crime. The conventional wisdom likens such precaution-taking to rent-seeking: citizens spend resources to shift crime losses onto other victims, without reducing the size of those losses to society. The result is an unambiguous reduction in social welfare. This Article argues that the conventional wisdom is flawed because it overlooks how the law systematically understates the harms suffered by some victims of crime, first, by …
The Law And Sociology Of Boilerplate, Todd D. Rakoff
The Law And Sociology Of Boilerplate, Todd D. Rakoff
Michigan Law Review
In my view, the scholarship presented at this symposium demonstrates that, in order to analyze form contracts and boilerplate successfully, one must carry out a set of operations that embodies an approach I will call law and sociology. But I presume I was invited to be a commentator at this conference on boilerplate not because the article I wrote on one branch of the subject awhile back exemplified this methodological approach, but because it took a rather strong substantive position. And so I think I ought first to say a brief word about that. The article in question concerned contracts …