Law Commons^™

Market Efficiency And Rationality: The Peculiar Case Of Baseball, Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

In this lively book, Michael Lewis explores a topic that would seem of interest only to sports fans: how Billy Beane, the charismatic general manager of the Oakland Athletics, turned his baseball team around using, of all things, statistics. What next - an inspirational tale about superior database management? But there are some general lessons in Lewis's book that make it worth the attention of people who do not know the difference between a slider and a screwball (a group that, unfortunately, includes many lawyers and law professors). Those lessons have to do, above all, with the limits of human …

The Great Gatsby, The Black Sox, High Finance, And American Law, Allen Boyer

Michigan Law Review

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the great novel of America in the 1920s. It is about someone pursuing a girl, and, more than that, it is about someone pursuing a dream. Jay Gatsby is someone who believes in the American dream of success. His life plays out the most famous piece of repartee between Fitzgerald and Hemingway - that the rich are very different from you and me, because they have more money. Gatsby is a man who thought that if he had the money, he would be rich, and could therefore be different.

After reading …