Law and Economics Commons^™

A Dangerous Supplement, Daria Roithmayr

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Lee Anne Fennell

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The False Promise Of De-Regulation In Banking, Jonathan R. Macey

ExpressO

Jonathan R. Macey

The False Promise of De-Regulation in Banking

Abstract

This Article presents new approach to the concept of "deregulation" in financial services and particularly banking. Generally regulatory policy is thought to involve more or less straightforward choices between regulation and deregulation. Those most concerned with market failure and equality of outcomes favoring regulation and those with faith in markets and concerns about efficient outcomes favoring deregulation.

This Article shows that government regulation, sometimes in heavy doses, is necessary in order for private markets to function effectively. Consequently, government has in important role to play in fostering markets. The …

The Deep Structure Of Law And Morality, Robin B. Kar

ExpressO

This Article argues that morality and law share a deep and pervasive structure, an analogue of what Noam Chomsky calls the “deep structure” of language. This structure arises not to resolve linguistic problems of generativity, but rather from the fact that morality and law engage psychological adaptations with the same natural function: to allow us to resolve social contract problems flexibly. Drawing on and extending a number of contemporary insights from evolutionary psychology and evolutionary game theory, this Article argues that we resolve these problems by employing a particular class of psychological attitudes, which are neither simply belief-like states nor …

Destabilizing The Normalization Of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role For Legal Empiricism, Thomas W. Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

Mitchell's study exemplifies the New Legal Realist goal of combining qualitative and quantitative empirical research to shed light on important legal and policy issues. He also demonstrates the utility of a ground-level contextual analysis that examines legal problems from the bottom up. The study tracks processes by which black rural landowners have gradually been dispossessed of more than 90% of the land held by their predecessors in 1910. Mitchell points out that despite the continuing practices that contribute to this problem, there has been very little research on the issue, and what little attention legal scholars have paid to it …

Calabresi's The Costs Of Accidents: A Generation Of Impact On Law And Scholarship, Donald G. Gifford

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Marine-Salvage Law And Marine-Peril-Related Policy: A Second-Best And Third-Best Economic-Efficiency Analysis Of The Problem, The Law, And The Classic Landes And Posner Study, Richard S. Markovits

Faculty Scholarship

This Article (1) delineates the different kinds of allocative costs that marine-peril contingencies can generate and the different kinds of marine-peril-related decisions that can generate allocative inefficiency (marine-salvage-operation investment decisions; decisions about whether to offer to attempt or to actually attempt marine rescues; decisions about the character of the marine-rescue attempts that are made; decisions by potential rescuees to accept or reject offers of marine-rescue attempts; and decisions by potential rescuees to make or reject various marine-peril-avoidance moves); (2) defines the formal meaning of "the most-allocatively-efficient response a State can make to marine-peril contingencies;" (3) explains why, standing alone, judge-prescribed …

The Law And Economics Of Development And Environment: An Introduction To The Symposium, Daniel H. Cole

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

What We Teach When We Teach About Race: The Problem Of Law And Pseudo-Economics, Steven A. Ramirez

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

On The Misuse Of The Nash Bargaining Solution In Law And Economics, Abraham L. Wickelgren

ExpressO

Bargaining plays a very important role in a great deal of legal scholarship, particularly in law and economics scholarship. Scholars often assume that the Nash bargaining solution determines the bargaining outcome, where the parties equally split the joint benefit created by the agreement. This solution, however, is inappropriate when parties have outside options, alternatives that only provide a payoff if the bargainer terminates the original bargaining. Most legal bargaining problems involve outside options. This article explains why the Nash bargaining solution generates an inappropriate outcome in this situation. Then, it examines several different prior articles that have used the Nash …

A Public Choice Theory Of Criminal Procedure, Vikramaditya S. Khanna, Keith N. Hylton

ExpressO

We provide a more persuasive justification for the pro-defendant bias in Anglo-American criminal procedure than the most commonly forwarded justifications to date. The most commonly forwarded rationale for the pro-defendant bias is that the costs of false convictions – specifically, the sanctioning and deterrence costs associated with the erroneous imposition of criminal sanctions – are greater than the costs of false acquittals. We argue that this rationale provides at best a partial justification for the extent of pro-defendant procedural rules. Under our alternative justification, pro-defendant protections serve primarily as constraints on the costs associated with improper enforcement or rent seeking …

Governance Structures, Legal Systems, And The Concept Of Law, Lewis A. Kornhauser

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Debate over the concept of law currently contrasts conceptual and interpretive accounts. This Article begins to elaborate a social-scientific conception of law as a subset of a concept of a governance structure. To begin, it distinguishes institutional structures, realized institutions, and functioning institutions. Governance structures consist of institutional structures that perform central tasks of governance. Dworkin's interpretive conception of law extends over the domain of functioning institutions; positivist, conceptual accounts of law extend over the domain of institutional structures. From this perspective legal systems may be best understood as governance structures that satisfy the political value legality; different concepts of …

Functional Law And Economics: The Search For Value-Neutral Principles Of Lawmaking, Francesco Parisi, Jonathan Klick

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Functional law and economics, which draws its influence from the public choice school of economic thought, stands as a bridge between the strictly positivist and normative approaches to law and economics. While the positive school emphasizes the inherent efficiency of legal rules and the normative school often views law as a solution to market failure and distributional inequality, functional law and economics recognizes the possibility for both market and legal failure. That is, while there are economic forces that lead to failures in the market, there are also structural forces that limit the law's ability to remedy those failures on …

Gödel, Kaplow, Shavell: Consistency And Completeness In Social Decision-Making, Giuseppe Dari Mattiacci

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The recent debate on what criteria ought to guide social decision-making has focused on consistency: it has been argued that criteria contradicting one another—namely, welfare and fairness—should not be simultaneously employed in order for policy assessment to be consistent. This Article raises the related problem of completeness—that is, the question of whether or not a set of consistent criteria is capable of providing answers to all social decision problems. If not, as it is suggested might be the case, then the only way to decide otherwise undecidable issues is to simultaneously employ both welfare and fairness, which implies a certain …

The Unexpected Guest: Law And Economics, Law And Other Cognate Disciplines, And The Future Of Legal Scholarship, Thomas S. Ulen

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This Article argues that law and economics has worked a remarkable but unexpected change on legal scholarship. Many critics mistakenly claim that the most notable effect of law and economics lies in its conclusions about substantive legal rules. This Article argues that this criticism misses the far more radical effect of law and economics on the study of law—namely, its commitment to the scientific method of inquiry, a method that relies upon theorizing, then performing empirical work to verify or refute the theory, and then refining the theory in light of the results. The Article explains why this change has …

Fairness And Welfare From A Comparative Law Perspective, Horacio Spector

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This Article discusses the relative value of law and economics and moral philosophy to explain private law in both common law and civil law jurisdictions. It argues that the recent philosophical paradigm, which revolves around the ideas of fairness and autonomy, is intellectually continuous with the School of Rationalist Natural Law. Though this School has been directly influential on the development of civilian private law, its ascendancy on common law cannot be documented. Paradoxically, recent philosophical explanations of private law bear on common law, while legal philosophers in civil law jurisdictions still follow Kelsen's research agenda, which focuses on the …

What Legal Scholars Can Learn From Law And Economics, Anthony Ogus

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The starting point of this Article is Richard Posner's statement of regret (in 1975) that, in terms of legal scholarship, "normative analysis vastly preponderates over positive," and that this can be corrected by the economic analysis of law. I consider that the positive, predictive contribution of law and economics is still undervalued. Lawyers, practitioners and academics, have much to learn from economic analysis because so often they fail to understand the nature of the interaction between law and market phenomena. This Article explores three areas of analysis to justify this contention: the interplay between public and private incentive systems to …

Securing Truth For Power: Informational Strategy And Regulatory Policy Making, Cary Coglianese

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Insights From Economics, Jennifer Gerarda Brown

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Analytical Methods For Lawyers, Howell E. Jackson

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Law And Macroeconomics Of The New Deal At 70 , Steven A. Ramirez

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Contractarian Economics And Mediation Ethics: The Case For Customizing Neutrality Through Contingent Fee Mediation, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Interplay Between Norms And Enforcement In Tax Compliance, Leandra Lederman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

What will increase individuals' compliance with the federal income tax? There are rich legal, economic, and sociological literatures examining this question. The traditional answer that increased enforcement will increase compliance is supported by both economic modeling and a number of experiments. However, studies show that appeals to normative beliefs about honesty in taxpaying play an important role as well.

A number of scholars have suggested that vigorous enforcement of the tax laws may be counterproductive because it may suggest that noncompliance is the norm. This article argues, in part, that enforcement and a compliance norm are not inconsistent but rather …

The Elementary Economics Of Bijuralism: A First Cut, James W. Bowers

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Mixed Signals: Rational-Choice Theories Of Social Norms And The Pragmatics Of Explanation, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The question of how societies secure cooperation and order in the absence of state enforced sanctions has long vexed law and economics scholars. Recently the concept of social norms--informally enforced rules of behavior--has occupied the attention of a large number of these theorists, who are concerned with understanding why economically rational actors would bother to follow rules whose costs seem to outweigh their benefits. Because of the prestige (or at least trendiness) of law and economics, it seems that now everyone in the legal academy is talking about social norms. This burgeoning scholarship is closely related to a wider concern …

Sentencing The Criminal Corproation, Poonam Puri

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article contributes to the debate on mandatory minimum sentences by analzing them in the context of the corporation as criminal and by employing a law and economics methodology. While the rational economic actor model maybe unrealistic when applied to individuals committing blue-collar crimes, it is a much more useful tool to describe the behaviour of criminal corporations that respond more directly to economic incentives. The article concludes that the mandatory fine for a corporation found guilty of a criminal offence should, at a minimum, equal the expected loss caused or profit gained from the wrongdoing.

Can Evolutionary Science Contribute To Discussions Of Law?, Jeffrey E. Stake

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Evolutionary Theory can be helpful in understanding the law and determining what it should be. There are two ways in which the evolutionary perspective differs from an economic perspective on law. Not only does the evolutionary approach shift our attention from the world today to the environment of evolutionary adaptation, it shifts our focus from rational individuals to rational genes and from rational behaviors to rational design of mental architecture. Finally, the law of law's leverage makes predictions about the relative elasticities of demand for all sorts of behaviors, including those that did and did not exist in the environment …

Insurer Moral Hazard In The Workers' Compensation Crisis: Reforming Cost Inflation, Not Rate Suppression, Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

This article challenges the standard story of the insurance crisis that led to the near-collapse and major reform of a number of states’ workers’ compensation programs in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the prevailing account, insurance costs rose due to expanding costs of benefits for injured workers’, much of which was blamed on wasteful or abusive "moral hazard" by workers and their lawyers and doctors. Because state regulators had substantial power to control insurance rates, this account claims governments tried to suppress prices in the face of rising benefit costs in a misguided attempt to avoid political trade-offs between labor …

Taking The Protection-Access Tradeoff Seriously, Harvey S. Perlman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law and economics scholarship has contributed much to our understanding of both the nature of intellectual property rights generally and the features of individual intellectual property regimes. Indeed it is hard to imagine a field other than antitrust law that is so explicitly governed by economic thinking. In authorizing the copyright and patent systems, Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution expressly incorporates a social welfare imperative as the basis for its grant of power.' Certainly economists and economically oriented legal academics have given the field the attention it is due.

I am far from being a sophisticated …

Labor Law And Industrial Peace: A Comparative Analysis Of The United States, The United Kingdom, Germany, And Japan Under The Bargaining Model, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this Article, Professor Dau-Schmidt provides a comparative analysis of the labor laws of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan for the purposes of identifying which characteristics of a country's labor laws are likely to reduce strike incidence and intensity and promote industrial peace. To identify which characteristics of a country's law are likely to encourage industrial peace, Professor Dau-Schmidt presents game theory arguments based on his analysis of unions and collective bargaining. Dau-Schmidt then provides a simple empirical test as to the relative success of different countries' laws in advancing industrial peace by comparing data on …