Law and Economics Commons^™

Response: Between Economics And Sociology: The New Path Of Deterrence, Dan M. Kahan

Michigan Law Review

The explosive collision of economics and sociology has long illuminated the landscape of deterrence theory. It is a debate as hopeless as it is spectacular. Economics is practical but thin. Starting from the simple premise that individuals rationally maximize their utility, economics generates a robust schedule of prescriptions - from the appropriate size of criminal penalties,1 to the optimal form of criminal punishments, to the most efficient mix of private and public investments in deterrence. Yet it is the very economy of economics that ultimately subverts it: its account of human motivations is too simplistic to be believable, and it …

Deterrence's Difficulty, Neal Kumar Katyal

Michigan Law Review

We all crave simple elegance. Physicists since Einstein have been searching for a grand unified theory that will tie everything together in a simple model. Law professors have their own grand theories - law and economics's Coase Theorem and constitutional law's Originalism immediately spring to mind. Criminal law is no different, for the analogue is our faith in deterrence - the belief that increasing the penalty on an activity will mean that fewer people will perform it. This theory has much to commend it. After all, economists and shoppers have known for ages that a price increase in a good …

Roundtable Discussion: Visions For The Future, Daniel L. Greenberg (Moderator), Anthony V. Alfieri, Michelle Adams, Edgar S. Cahn, Jennifer Gordon, Luis Garden Acosta, Alan W. Houseman, Errol G. Louis, Esmerelda Simmons, David A. Thomas

Articles

No abstract provided.

Child Care Policy And The Welfare Reform Act, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

This article sketches the 1996 Welfare Reform Act's major changes with particular attention to federally subsidized child care for low-income families.

The German Duality Of State And Society, David Abraham

Articles

No abstract provided.

Anglo-American Jurisprudence And Latin America, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Adventures In The Zone Of Twilight: Separation Of Powers And National Economic Security In The Mexican Bailout, Russell D. Covey

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Cyberlaw And Social Change: A Democratic Approach To Copyright Law In Cyberspace, Niva Elkin-Koren

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Local Government Boundary Problem In Metropolitan Areas, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Local government boundaries play an important role in the governance of metropolitan areas by defining local electorates and tax bases and the scope of local regulatory powers and service responsibilities. Yet, the close association of local powers with local boundaries generates spillovers, fiscal disparities, and interlocal conflicts. Real local autonomy is constrained but the local government system fails to provide a means for addressing regional problems. Public choice theorists and political decentralizationists oppose regional governments because of the threat to local autonomy that would result from removing powers from local hands. Richard Briffault's solution to the metropolitan governance problem is …

Critical Cultural Law And Economics, The Culture Of Deindividualization, The Paradox Of Blackness, Linz Audain

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Economics As One Of The Humanities; An Ecumenical Response To Weisberg, West, And White, Paul J. Heald

Scholarly Works

The Law and Literature movement seems to have a deadly adversary: the Law and Economics movement. Several of the most respected literary lawyers have recently argued that economic discourse subverts the goals of humanistic scholarship. Richard Weisberg decries, for example, “the insurgency of ‘free market’ economics, a disgracefully self-serving system of ethical reductionism and human evasion [that has] attracted masses of practitioners away from the essence of their fields, away from the passions, the hopes, the reality of the world around them.” Robin West has criticized “economic man” for his “empathic impotence,” and has suggested replacing him with a more …

The European Bank For Reconstruction And Development And The Post-Cold War Era, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Liberalization Of India’S Trade And Investment Policies: Pitfalls And Advantages For U.S. Firms Doing Business In India, Sanjiv Verma

LLM Theses and Essays

A rich history of trade and commerce ties America to India. This paper examines the contemporary trade issues between America and India, particularly in light of recent economic reforms in India. It inquires into and analyzes the various advantages India can provide for US businesses as a foreign investment destination. Various barriers to trade between these two nations are identified, such as tariff and nontariff barriers, quota restrictions, and infrastructural and social barriers. This paper gives a brief overview of some of the recent economic policy changes in India, suggests legislative and policy improvements required to attract more US investments …

Some Thoughts On Poverty And Failure In The Market For Children's Human Capital, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Procedural Fairness And Incentive Programs: Reflections On The Environmental Choice Program, David S. Cohen

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This paper explores the application of procedural fairness to the federal government’s Environmental Choice Program’s decision-making processes. While Canadian courts have traditionally required public bureaucrats to act “fairly” when implementing command models of regulation, they have only recently been confronted with demands that regulators implementing economic incentive programs also act in accordance with procedural fairness norms.

Sex, Reason, And A Taste For The Absurd, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Like much of Richard Posner's best work, Sex and Reason does many things, and for that reason will no doubt attract a large and diverse readership. This heavily footnoted, exhaustively researched, and imminently accessible book is a welcome introduction to the interdisciplinary study of sex. For the lay reader it presents an arresting set of speculations about human sexuality, drawn from the author's evident familiarity with a sizeable library of studies representing at least half a dozen scientific and social scientific disciplines, assembled in a readable and lively way. Of more interest, perhaps, to academicians and social scientists familiar with …

Child Care Enterprise, Community Development, And Work, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

Child care enterprise can be a vehicle for community-based economic development. Beyond the critical goal of child care service, day care as an enterprise can help build capacity for job creation and entrepreneurship in the inner city and in disadvantaged communities. Stable child care institutions with quality jobs can sound a counterpoint to the feminization of poverty. The demand for child care services is substantial and growing. In single parent families and in households with two working parents, day care is essential to enable parents to work or go to school. Further, high quality early childhood programs can have a …

Chaos Theory And The Justice Paradox, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

"[T]he laws have mistakes, and you can't go writing up a law for everything that you can imagine."

"When you reach an equilibrium in biology you're dead."

As we approach the Twenty-First Century, the signs of social disarray are everywhere. Social critics observe the breakdown of core structures – the nuclear family, schools, neighborhoods, and political groups. As these traditional social institutions have disintegrated, the law has expanded to fill the void. There are more laws, more lawyers, and more use of legal mechanisms to accomplish social goals than at any other time in history. The custodians and interpreters of …

Sex Stories: A Review Of Sex And Reason, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

In this review of Sex Stories-A Review Of Sex And Reason by Richard A. Posner, Professor Chon explores the implications of Posner’s exuberant faith in bioeconomic reasoning, unalloyed by any of the late modernist or postmodernist challenges to the nature and limits of science and its transformative potential. In doing so, Professor Chon attempts three things. First, she discusses some of his sociobiological assertions in order to demonstrate that evolutionary biology consists of a much richer and more contradictory set of assertions than Posner would have us believe. Even within the empiricist framework, therefore, Posner leaves out many stories that …

Judicial Choice And Disparities Between Measures Of Economic Values, David S. Cohen

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

An important idea, which characterizes law in society, is a reluctance to move from the status quo. In general, one can argue that legal institutions and legal doctrine are not engaged in the redistribution of wealth from one party to another. This paper explores a possible explanation for that principle. The authors' research suggests that, across a wide range of entitlements and in a variety of contexts, individuals value losses more than foregone gains. The paper argues, as a matter of efficiency, that law and social policy might have developed in a manner consistent with this valuation disparity. Furthermore, this …

A Modern Proposal, Sidney Delong

Faculty Articles

This article humorously explains Jonathan Swift’s intention when he wrote “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country.” Swift was not writing satirically, his analysis was purely written from an economic standpoint as was Landes and Posner’s modern proposal. Landes and Posner recognized the allocative efficiencies and wealth gains that can be realized when property rights are created in noncommodities, such as people, as did Jonathan Swift.

Procedural Options For Resolving Hearsay Issues, Roger C. Park

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Improving The Procedure For Resolving Hearsay Issues, Richard D. Friedman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Law's Secrets, Gary T. Marx

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law by Kim Lane Scheppele

Social Irresponsibility, Actuarial Assumptions, And Wealth Redistribution: Lessons About Public Policy From A Prepaid Tuition Program, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Michigan Law Review

In this article, I shall try to illuminate the question of how governments, as opposed to private insurers, grapple with the problem of intergenerational social irresponsibility. I shall do so by analyzing and criticizing a single public program. That program, the Michigan Education Trust (MET), was the most widely publicized government action in the field of higher education finance during the 1980s. MET allows parents of young children to purchase contracts promising to cover the children's tuition at Michigan public colleges when they enroll up to eighteen years later.

In setting forth this case study, I also attempt to develop …

Regulating Regulators: The Legal Environment Of The State, David S. Cohen

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In this paper I focus on the ability of tort law to reduce primary costs, or losses associated with the number and seriousness of accidents. In one sense I will be analysing the state as if it were a private firm in which losses suffered by private individuals and firms are externalities. Several years ago Mark Spitzer wrote a paper on this topic in which he posited several models of state activity and analysed the incentive effects of liability rules in each case. In my view Spitzer's general conclusion - the rule which may be synthesized from all of the …

Sugar Coated Bullets: Corruption And The New Economic Order In China, Mark Findlay, Thomas Chor-Wing Chiu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The recent political debate concerning the influence of corruption on the “new economic order” in the People's Republic of China is unique not only for its detailed and public manifestations, but also because it works around the acceptance of some degree of corporate private ownership of the means of production within China. The concern for corruption in Chinese government and commerce is not, of itself, novel.We prefer in this paper briefly to focus on the economic and political environment from within which this concern has been generated, to comment on the significance for the Government of the PRC in associating …

Cable Traffic And The First Amendment Must-Carry Under A Diversity Approach And Antitrust As Possible Alternative, Bruno Vandermeulen

LLM Theses and Essays

Recent technological progress in the field of telecommunications has greatly changed the competitive structure between broadcasters, cable operators, and telephone companies. The legal and economic environment for these media participants has shifted, and new problems have arisen. One major problem is the enhanced threat of concentration of media corporations, as corporate bigness becomes desirable and the number of diversified owners of media outlets continues to decrease. This paper analyzes broadcasting regulations and subsequent case law to show the concern by the legislature and regulatory agencies to preserve diversity in opinion and media-ownership through emphasis on “localism” and a “marketplace of …

Questioning Broadcast Regulation, Jonathan Weinberg

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Seven Dirty Words and Six Other Stories: Controlling the Content of Print and Broadcast by Matthew L. Spitzer

Regulation And The United States Corporation: An Alternative To Law-And-Economics, Jan G. Deutsch

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.