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Full-Text Articles in Law
If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them: Richard Posner And Behavioral Law And Economics, Avishalom Tor, Doran Teichman, Eyal Zamir
If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them: Richard Posner And Behavioral Law And Economics, Avishalom Tor, Doran Teichman, Eyal Zamir
Journal Articles
Since its publication in 1973, Economic Analysis of Law (the Treatise) by Richard Posner has been recognized as the canonical treatise in the field. Given this status, observing changes over time in the different editions of the book can highlight substantial and methodological shifts in the area. On this backdrop, this brief essay will highlight Posner's change of attitude towards behavioral analysis of law over the years, culminating with the incorporation of behavioral insights into the las edition of this book, published in 2024.
Behavioral Public Choice And The Law, Gary M. Lucas Jr., Slaviša Tasić
Behavioral Public Choice And The Law, Gary M. Lucas Jr., Slaviša Tasić
Faculty Scholarship
Behavioral public choice is the study of irrationality among political actors. In this context, irrationality means systematic bias, a deviation from rational expectations, or other departure from economists’ conception of rationality. Behavioral public choice scholars extend the insights of behavioral economics to the political realm and show that irrational behavior is an important source of government failure. This Article makes an original contribution to the legal literature by systematically reviewing the findings of behavioral public choice and explaining their implications for the law and legal institutions. We discuss the various biases and heuristics that lead political actors to support and …
Self-Handicapping And Managers’ Duty Of Care, David A. Hoffman
Self-Handicapping And Managers’ Duty Of Care, David A. Hoffman
All Faculty Scholarship
This symposium essay focuses on the relationship between managers' duty of care and self-handicapping, or constructing obstacles to performance with the goal of influencing subsequent explanations about outcomes. Conventional explanations for failures of caretaking by managers have focused on motives (greed) and incentives (agency costs). This account of manager behavior has led some modern jurists, concerned about recent corporate scandals, to advocate for stronger deterrent measures to realign manager and shareholder incentives. * Self-handicapping theory, by contrast, teaches that bad manager behavior may occur even when incentives are well-aligned. Highly successful individuals in particular come to fear the pressure of …
The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman
The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman
All Faculty Scholarship
This Article provides the first extensive legal treatment of an important defense in the law of fraud and contracts: puffery. Legal authorities commonly say they make decisions about whether defendants should be able to utter exaggerated, optimistic, lies based on assumptions about buyer behavior, concluding that consumers do not rely on such speech. However, as the Article shows, such analyses are proxies for a deeper analytical question: does the speech encourage or discourage a type of consumption activity that the court deems welfare maximizing? The Article presents a novel constitutional analysis of puffery doctrine that focuses on the meaning of …
The "Duty" To Be A Rational Shareholder, David A. Hoffman
The "Duty" To Be A Rational Shareholder, David A. Hoffman
All Faculty Scholarship
How and when do courts determine that corporate disclosures are actionable under the federal securities laws? The applicable standard is materiality: would a (mythical) reasonable investor have considered a given disclosure important. As I establish through empirical and statistical testing of approximately 500 cases analyzing the materiality standard, judicial findings of immateriality are remarkably common, and have been stable over time. Materiality's scope results in the dismissal of a large number of claims, and creates a set of cases in which courts attempt to explain and defend their vision of who is, and is not, a reasonable investor. Thus, materiality …
Mixed Signals: Rational-Choice Theories Of Social Norms And The Pragmatics Of Explanation, W. Bradley Wendel
Mixed Signals: Rational-Choice Theories Of Social Norms And The Pragmatics Of Explanation, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
The question of how societies secure cooperation and order in the absence of state enforced sanctions has long vexed law and economics scholars. Recently the concept of social norms--informally enforced rules of behavior--has occupied the attention of a large number of these theorists, who are concerned with understanding why economically rational actors would bother to follow rules whose costs seem to outweigh their benefits. Because of the prestige (or at least trendiness) of law and economics, it seems that now everyone in the legal academy is talking about social norms. This burgeoning scholarship is closely related to a wider concern …