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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Law
What (If Anything) Can Economics Say About Equity?, Daniel A. Farber
What (If Anything) Can Economics Say About Equity?, Daniel A. Farber
Daniel A Farber
Does economics have anything to teach us about the meaning of fairness? The leading practitioners of law and economics disagree. Judge Richard Posner argues that economics is largely irrelevant to distributive issues. Posner maintains that the most useful economic measure of social welfare is cost-benefit analysis (which he calls wealth maximization). But, he observes, this economic measure "ratifies and perfects an essentially arbitrary distribution of wealth." Given an ethically acceptable initial assignment of wealth, rules based on economic efficiency may have some claim to be considered fair. On the critical issue of distributional equity, however, Posner apparently believes that economics …
Could Breach Of Contract Be Immoral?, Seana Shiffrin
Could Breach Of Contract Be Immoral?, Seana Shiffrin
Michigan Law Review
Some scholars defend the contract law's ban on punitive damage awards on the grounds that breach of contract, in itself, is not morally wrong. In this Article, I offer two responses. First, I refute one prevalent argument of Steven Shavell's in support of this view. Shavell argues that contractual breach is not immoral in those cases in which the legal regime would offer expectation damages because the contracting parties would not have agreed to require performance had they explicitly deliberated about the circumstances occasioning the breach. I criticize his argument for failing to justify this hypothetical-contract approach and, in any …
Revisiting The Roles Of Legal Rules And Tax Rules In Income Redistribution: A Response To Kaplow & Shavell, Ronen Avraham, David Fortus, Kyle D. Logue
Revisiting The Roles Of Legal Rules And Tax Rules In Income Redistribution: A Response To Kaplow & Shavell, Ronen Avraham, David Fortus, Kyle D. Logue
Articles
The debate over whether legal rules should be used to redistribute resources in society or whether redistribution should be left exclusively to the tax-and-transfer system has long occupied philosophers, political theorists, economists, and legal academicians. For many years, the conventional wisdom on this question among legal scholars seemed to be that blanket generalizations were inappropriate. All systems of redistribution distort individuals' choices and entail administrative costs. Therefore, the argument went, a universal preference for using the tax-and-transfer system to redistribute is not justified. Rather, the choice among institutions to accomplish society's redistributive goals was considered to be "an empirical one …
What (If Anything) Can Economics Say About Equity?, Daniel A. Farber
What (If Anything) Can Economics Say About Equity?, Daniel A. Farber
Michigan Law Review
Does economics have anything to teach us about the meaning of fairness? The leading practitioners of law and economics disagree. Judge Richard Posner argues that economics is largely irrelevant to distributive issues. Posner maintains that the most useful economic measure of social welfare is cost-benefit analysis (which he calls wealth maximization). But, he observes, this economic measure "ratifies and perfects an essentially arbitrary distribution of wealth." Given an ethically acceptable initial assignment of wealth, rules based on economic efficiency may have some claim to be considered fair. On the critical issue of distributional equity, however, Posner apparently believes that economics …
Should We All Be Welfare Economists?, Richard H. Fallon Jr.
Should We All Be Welfare Economists?, Richard H. Fallon Jr.
Michigan Law Review
On what normative foundation should the edifice of law and public policy be built? What are proper grounds for claims of individual right, and how, generally, do those grounds relate to considerations of individual well-being and social welfare? In this Essay, I argue that individual well-being and a related concept of social welfare should be important considerations in the design of legal rules, but not the exclusive ones. When the notion of well-being receives substantive content, the most plausible and attractive definitions all allow a distinction between what will best promote a person's well-being and what that person might rationally …
Redistributing Optimally: Of Tax Rules, Legal Rules, And Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Ronen Avraham
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" …
Pliability Rules, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky
Pliability Rules, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky
Michigan Law Review
In 1543, the Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, determined the heliocentric design of the solar system. Copernicus was motivated in large part by the conviction that Claudius Ptolemy's geocentric astronomical model, which dominated scientific thought at that time, was too incoherent, complex, and convoluted to be true. Hence, Copernicus made a point of making his model coherent, simple, and elegant. Nearly three and a half centuries later, at the height of the impressionist movement, the French painter Claude Monet set out to depict the Ruen Cathedral in a series of twenty paintings, each presenting the cathedral in a different light. Monet's …