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Law and Economics Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences

2008

Law and economics

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics

Miscalculating Welfare, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan Mar 2008

Miscalculating Welfare, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

In their quest to maximize efficiency, law and economics scholars often produce novel, creative, and counterintuitive legal rules. Indeed, legal economists have argued for baby selling, against anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, and for insider trading. In this essay, we discuss some concerns about this form of legal scholarship that privileges the creative and counterintuitive over the fair, mundane, and intuitive. Drawing on a range of empirical evidence, this essay argues that the failure to include, and to give sufficient weight to, fairness preferences undermines legal economists' policy recommendations. Specifically, after setting forth three examples of this phenomenon, in the …

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A Positive Theory Of Eminent Domain, Eric Kades Mar 2008

A Positive Theory Of Eminent Domain, Eric Kades

Eric A. Kades

By examining a novel data set of land acquisitions and condemnations for roads by all 50 states, this article attempts to formulate a positive theory of states’ invocation of their eminent domain power. Litigation models based on irrationality and asymmetric information suggest that geography, demography, and legal rules may influence the frequency with which state officials resort to condemnation. To a significant degree, the data support these models, as water area and hilliness (geography), population density (demography), and legal rules (fee-shifting statutes) explain a significant portion of the state-state variation in condemnation rates. A number of other theoretically relevant explanatory …

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The Methodology Of The Behavioral Analysis Of Law, Avishalom Tor Jan 2008

The Methodology Of The Behavioral Analysis Of Law, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

This article examines the behavioral analysis of law, meaning the application of empirical behavioral evidence to legal analysis, which has become increasingly popular in legal scholarship in recent years. Following the introduction in Part I, this Article highlights four central propositions on the subject. The first, developed in Part II, asserts that the efficacy of the law often depends on its accounting for relevant patterns of human behavior, most notably those studied by behavioral decision scientists. This Part therefore reviews important behavioral findings, illustrating their application and relevance to a broad range of legal questions. Part III then argues that …

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