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Series

2003

Law and Economics

Kaplow (Louis)

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Redistributing Optimally: Of Tax Rules, Legal Rules, And Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Ronen Avraham Jan 2003

Redistributing Optimally: Of Tax Rules, Legal Rules, And Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Ronen Avraham

Articles

From the beginning of the law and economics movement, normative legal economists have focused almost exclusively on evaluating the efficiency of alternative legal rules. The distributional consequences of legal rules, therefore, have largely been ignored. It is tempting to conclude that legal economists are hostile or indifferent to concerns of distributional fairness. In fact, however, the discipline of economics has a great deal to say about distributional policy. The normative branch of economics, known as welfare economics, has always been deeply concerned with distributional issues. It is not that welfare economists purport to know a priori the "right" or "optimal" …


Legal Transitions, Rational Expectations, And Legal Progress, Kyle D. Logue Jan 2003

Legal Transitions, Rational Expectations, And Legal Progress, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

In the literature on legal transitions, the term "transition policy" is generally understood to mean a rule or norm that influences policymakers' decisions concerning the extent to which legal change should be accompanied by transition relief, whether in the form of grandfathering or phase-ins or direct compensation. Legal change within this literature is defined broadly, and somewhat counter-intuitively, to include any resolution of the uncertainty regarding what the law will be in the future or how the law will be applied to future circumstances. Thus, a legal change would obviously include an unexpected repeal of a tax provision, such as …