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Full-Text Articles in Legal Theory
Miscalculating Welfare, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
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 …
Moral Spillovers: The Effect Of Moral Violations On Deviant Behavior, Elizabeth Mullen, Janice Nadler
Moral Spillovers: The Effect Of Moral Violations On Deviant Behavior, Elizabeth Mullen, Janice Nadler
Faculty Working Papers
Two experiments investigated whether outcomes that violate people's moral standards increase their deviant behavior (the moral spillover effect). In Study 1, participants read about a legal trial in which the outcome supported, opposed or was unrelated to their moral convictions. Relative to when outcomes supported moral convictions, when outcomes opposed moral convictions people judged the outcome to be less fair, were more angry, were less willing to accept the outcome, and were more likely to take a borrowed pen. In Study 2, participants who recalled another person's moral violation were more likely to cheat on an experimental task relative to …