Law and Economics Commons^™

Welfare, Children And Families: The Impact Of Welfare Reform In The New Economy, Georgetown University Law Center

Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture

In 2001, University Professor, William Julius Wilson of Harvard University, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s twenty-first Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: "Welfare, Children and Families: The Impact of Welfare Reform in the New Economy."

William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of only 20 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member. After receiving the Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1966, Wilson taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972. In 1990 he was …

Copyright And The Perfect Curve, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay argues that the assumption that “progress” is qualitatively independent of the underlying entitlement structure is wrong. In particular, I shall argue that a shift to a copyright rule structure based on highly granular, contractually enforced “price discrimination” would work a fundamental shift, as well, in the nature of the progress produced. The critique of the contractual price discrimination model, moreover, exposes deep defects in the use of neoclassical “law and economics” methodology to solve problems relating to the incentive structure of copyright law. What is needed, instead, is an economic model of copyright that acknowledges the central role …

The Rights Of Statistical People, Lisa Heinzerling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Comment, I argue that the use of cost-benefit analysis to evaluate life-saving regulatory programs has, in a society that eschews reliance on cost-benefit analysis in other life-saving situations, been justified by the creation of a new kind of entity-the statistical person. A primary feature of the statistical person, as I will explain, is that she is unidentified; she is no one's sister, or daughter, or mother. Indeed, in one conception, the statistical person is not a person at all, but rather only a collection of risks. By distinguishing statistical lives from the lives of those we know, economic …

Lochner In Cyberspace: The New Economic Orthodoxy Of "Rights Management", Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I of this Article describes the economic models now proffered as the basis for defining rights in digital works, and explores their striking resemblance to the system of social ordering described and advanced in the Supreme Court's Lochner-era decisions. The ghost of Lochner is not invoked lightly, nor with intent to belittle. Lochner represented a particular ideal of social ordering, premised on a seamless convergence of the private-law institutions of property and contract to provide a zone of legal insulation for market outcomes. In the physical world, that vision has long been compromised by evidence of market failures …

Understanding Mahon In Historical Context, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Despite its enormous influence on constitutional law, Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon is just such an opinion; the primary purpose of the author’s article Jam for Justice Holmes: Reassessing the Significance of Mahon is to clarify Holmes's intent by placing the opinion in historical context and in the context of Holmes's other opinions. While other scholars have also sought to place Mahon in context, his account differs in large part because of its recognition, as part of the background of Mahon, of a separate line of cases involving businesses affected with a public interest.

The author argues that at …

Jam For Justice Holmes: Reassessing The Significance Of Mahon, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

When courts and commentators discuss Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, they use the same word with remarkable regularity: famous. Mahon has achieved this fame in part because it was the occasion for conflict between judicial giants, and because the result seems ironic. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--the great Lochner dissenter and a jurist generally considered a champion of judicial deference to legislatures in the sphere of economic decision-making--wrote the opinion striking down a Pennsylvania statute barring coal mining that could cause the surface to cave-in. Sharply dissenting from Holmes's opinion was his consistent ally on the Court, Justice Louis …

Toward Humanistic Theories Of Legal Justice, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In an oft-quoted aside, Justice Holmes once remarked that when lawyers in his courtroom make appeal to justice, he stops listening: such appeals do nothing but signal that the lawyer has neither the facts nor law on his side, or worse, that he is ignorant of whatever law might be relevant.' Holmes's remark has not gone unheeded. Holmes's legacy, in part, is precisely this lapse: we don't have, or teach, a guiding theory of legal justice, nor do we have, or teach, a family of competing theories of legal justice, that might inform our work in law, at least as …

The World Bank’S Role In Controlling Corruption, Georgetown University Law Center

Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture

In 1997, Professor of Law and Political Science, Susan Rose-Ackerman of Yale University, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s seventeenth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: "The World Bank’s Role in Controlling Corruption."

Susan Rose-Ackerman is Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University, and Co-director of the Law School’s Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Fullbright Commission. She was a visiting Research Fellow at the World Bank in 1995-96 where she did research on corruption and economic …

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 …

Post-Chicago Law And Economics, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is not another "law-and-econ" bashing symposium. Nor is the symposium's title intended to denigrate Chicago School law and economics any more than the term "Post-Keynesian economics" was intended to denigrate the work of John Maynard Keynes. Instead, this symposium marks the fact that many practitioners of law and economics have moved well beyond the stereotypes familiar to most legal academics. Rather than designating an entirely new school of thought, the term "Post-Chicago law and economics" refers to a new era in which a variety of new questions about law and lawmaking is being asked and a variety of promising …

Economic Man And Literary Woman: One Contrast, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The law and literature movement has been with us long enough that it is now possible to speak seriously of a "literary analysis of law," just as it has become possible, and even standard, to speak of an "economic analysis of law." It is also standard, of course, to speak of that abstract character who has emerged from the economic analysis of law: "economic man." In these brief comments, I want to offer one contrast of the "economic man" that emerges from economic legal analysis with the "literary person" that is beginning to emerge from literary legal analysis. I will …

Authority, Autonomy, And Choice: The Role Of Consent In The Moral And Political Visions Of Franz Kafka And Richard Posner, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In "The Ethical and Political Basis of Wealth Maximization" and two related articles, Professor (now Judge) Richard Posner argues that widely shared pro-autonomy moral values are furthered by wealth-maximizing market transfers, judicial decisions, and legal institutions advocated by members of the "law and economics" school of legal theory. Such transactions, decisions, and institutions are morally attractive, Posner argues, because they support autonomy; wealth-maximizing transfers are those to which all affected parties have given their consent. This Article argues that Posner's attempt to defend wealth-maximization on principles of consent rests on a simplistic and false psychological theory of human motivation. Posner's …