Law Commons^™

Time-Shifted Rationality And The Law Of Law's Leverage: Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

A flood of recent scholarship explores legal implications of seemingly irrational behaviors by invoking cognitive psychology and notions of bounded rationality. In this article, I argue that advances in behavioral biology have largely overtaken existing notions of bounded rationality, revealing them to be misleadingly imprecise - and rooted in outdated assumptions that are not only demonstrably wrong, but also wrong in ways that have material implications for subsequent legal conclusions. This can be remedied. Specifically, I argue that behavioral biology offers three things of immediate use. First, behavioral biology can lay a foundation for both revising bounded rationality and fashioning …

The Evolution Of Irrationality, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

The place of the rational actor model in the analysis of individual and social behavior relevant to law remains unresolved. In recent years, scholars have sought frameworks to explain: a) disjunctions between seemingly rational behavior and seemingly irrational behavior; b) the origins of and influences on law-relevant preferences, and c) the nonrandom development of norms. This Article explains two components of an evolutionary framework that, building from accessible insights of behavioral biology, can encompass all three. The components are: "time-shifted rationality" and "the law of law's leverage."

Law And The Biology Of Rape: Reflections On Transitions, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

This Article serves is a sequel to a previous Article: Sex, Culture, and the Biology of Rape: Toward Explanation and Prevention, 87 Cal. L. Rev. 827 (1999). Part I briefly considers the threshold question: why consider the behavioral biology of sexual aggression at all? Part II proposes that the first step in transitioning to a more accurate and more useful model of rape behavior is to avoid a number of common definitional ambiguities that plague most rape discussions. Because those ambiguities are particularly likely to foster misunderstandings about biobehavioral perspectives, Part II also clarifies the scope of what biobehavioral theories …

Endowment Effects In Chimpanzees, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan, Susan P. Lambeth, Mary Catherine Mareno, Amanda S. Richardson, Steven Schapiro

Owen Jones

Human behavior is not always consistent with standard rational choice predictions. The much-investigated variety of apparent deviations from rational choice predictions provides a promising arena for the merger of economics and biology. Although little is known about the extent to which other species also exhibit these seemingly irrational patterns of human decision-making and choice behavior, similarities across species would suggest a common evolutionary root to the phenomena.

The present study investigated whether chimpanzees exhibit an endowment effect, a seemingly paradoxical behavior in which humans tend to value a good they have just come to possess more than they would have …

The Origins Of Shared Intuitions Of Justice, Owen D. Jones, Paul H. Robinson, Robert Kurzban

Owen Jones

Contrary to the common wisdom among criminal law scholars, empirical evidence reveals that people's intuitions of justice are often specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself-physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions-the shared intuitions are stunningly consistent across cultures as well as demographics. It is puzzling that judgments of moral blameworthiness, which seem so complex and subjective, reflect such a remarkable consensus. What could explain this striking result?

The authors theorize that one explanation may be an evolved predisposition toward these shared intuitions of justice, …

Realities Of Rape: Of Science And Politics, Causes And Meanings, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

This review essay discusses the book A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer (MIT Press, 2000). The essay builds on work previously appearing in Owen D. Jones, Sex, Culture, and the Biology of Rape: Toward Explanation and Prevention, 87 Cal. L. Rev. 827 (1999) and Owen D. Jones, Law and the Biology of Rape: Reflections on Transitions, 11 Hastings Women's Law Journal 151 (2000).

Realism, Punishment, And Reform, Owen D. Jones, Paul H. Robinson, Robert Kurzban

Owen Jones

Professors Donald Braman, Dan Kahan, and David Hoffman, in their article "Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism," to be published in an upcoming issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, critique a series of our articles: Concordance and Conflict in Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=932067), The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726), and Intuitions of Justice: Implications for Criminal Law and Justice Policy (http://ssrn.com/abstract=976026). Our reply, here, follows their article in that coming issue.

As we demonstrate, they have misunderstood our views on, and thus the implications of, widespread agreement about punishing the "core" of wrongdoing. Although much of their …

On The Nature Of Norms: Biology, Morality, And The Disruption Of Order, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

This essay discusses the legal implications of bio-behavioral underpinnings to norms, morality, and economic order. It first discusses the recent book "The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order," in which Francis Fukuyama explores the importance of evolved human nature to the reconstruction of social order and a thriving economy. It then addresses the extent to which we can usefully view law-relevant norms as products of evolutionary - as well as economic - processes.

Law, Biology, And Property: A New Theory Of The Endowment Effect, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan

Owen Jones

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially increased predictive power concerning, various psychological traits relevant to law. This Article describes an experiment that explores that context.

The paradoxical psychological bias known as the endowment effect puzzles economists, skews market behavior, impedes efficient exchange of goods and rights, and thereby poses important problems for law. Although the effect is known to vary widely, there are at …

Law And Behavioral Biology, Owen D. Jones, Timothy H. Goldsmith

Owen Jones

Society uses law to encourage people to behave differently than they would behave in the absence of law. This fundamental purpose makes law highly dependent on sound understandings of the multiple causes of human behavior. The better those understandings, the better law can achieve social goals with legal tools. In this Article, Professors Jones and Goldsmith argue that many long held understandings about where behavior comes from are rapidly obsolescing as a consequence of developments in the various fields constituting behavioral biology. By helping to refine law's understandings of behavior's causes, they argue, behavioral biology can help to improve law's …

Evolutionary Analysis In Law: Some Objections Considered, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

This Article appears in a special issue of the Brooklyn Law Review on DNA: Lessons from the Past - Problems for the Future. It first addresses why law needs insights from behavioral biology, and then identifies and responds to a variety of structural and conceptual barriers to such evolutionary analysis in law.

Evolutionary Analysis In Law: An Introduction And Application To Child Abuse, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

For contemporary biologists, behavior - like physical form - evolves. Although evolutionary processes do not dictate behavior in any inflexible sense, they nonetheless contribute significantly to the prevalence of various behavioral predispositions that, in turn, tend to yield observable patterns of behavior within every known species.

This Article explores the implications for law of evolved behavioral predispositions in humans, urging both caution and optimism.

Part I of the Article provides A Primer in Law-Relevant Evolutionary Biology, assuming no prior knowledge in the subject. Part II coins the term evolutionary analysis in law and proposes a model for conducting it. That …