Law and Economics | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

Adventures In Higher Education, Happiness, And Mindfulness, Peter H. Huang Jan 2018

Adventures In Higher Education, Happiness, And Mindfulness, Peter H. Huang

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This Article recounts my unique adventures in higher education, including being a Princeton University freshman mathematics major at age 14, Harvard University applied mathematics graduate student at age 17, economics and finance faculty at multiple schools, first-year law student at the University of Chicago, second- and third-year law student at Stanford University, and law faculty at multiple schools. This Article also candidly discusses my experiences as student and professor and openly shares how I achieved sustainable happiness by practicing mindfulness to reduce fears, rumination, and worry in facing adversity, disappointment, and setbacks. This Article analyzes why law schools should teach …

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How Improving Decision-Making And Mindfulness Can Improve Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang Jan 2015

How Improving Decision-Making And Mindfulness Can Improve Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

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Lawyers who behave unethically and unprofessionally do so for various reasons, ranging from intention to carelessness. Lawyer misconduct can also result from decision-making flaws. Psychologist Chip Heath and his brother Dan Heath, in their best-selling book, Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work, suggest a process to improve people’s decision-making. They introduce the acronym WRAP as the mnemonic for these decision-making heuristics: (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality-test your assumptions, (3) Attain distance before deciding, and (4) Prepare to be wrong. The WRAP process mitigates these cognitive biases: (1) narrow framing of a decision problem, (2) …

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The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos Jan 2012

The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos

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The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades, the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector …

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Lawyers' Bargaining Ethics, Contract, And Collaboration: The End Of The Legal Profession And The Beginning Of Professional Pluralism, Scott R. Peppet Jan 2005

Lawyers' Bargaining Ethics, Contract, And Collaboration: The End Of The Legal Profession And The Beginning Of Professional Pluralism, Scott R. Peppet

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This Article combines contractarian economics and traditional ethical theory to argue for a radical revision of the legal profession's codes of ethics. That revision would end the legal profession as we know it-one profession, regulated by one set of ethical rules that apply to all lawyers regardless of circumstance. It would replace the existing uniform conception of the lawyer's role with a more heterogeneous profession in which lawyers and clients could contractually choose the ethical obligations under which they wanted to operate. This "contract model" of legal ethics, in which lawyers could opt in and out of various ethical constraints, …

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A New Options Theory For Risk Multipliers Of Attorney's Fees In Federal Civil Rights Litigation, Peter H. Huang Jan 1998

A New Options Theory For Risk Multipliers Of Attorney's Fees In Federal Civil Rights Litigation, Peter H. Huang

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Given the importance of private enforcement of federal civil rights laws, Congress and the courts have attempted to encourage plaintiffs' attorneys to accept meritorious civil rights cases through fee shifting and risk multipliers. Recently, however, the Supreme Court has essentially prohibited the use of risk multipliers, thus undercompensating attorneys for the risk of losing civil rights actions and discouraging the filing of such cases. In this Article, Professor Huang develops a new options-based theory of calculating attorney's fees. Professor Huang argues that a lawsuit consists of a sequence of options to continue with the case rather than a once-and-for-all irreversible …

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In-Kind Class Action Settlements, Scott R. Peppet Jan 1996