In his 1993 Nobel Laureate lecture, the leading theorist of institutional economics, Douglass North, emphasized the relevance of his life’s work for economic development policy. Twenty years prior, in his book authored with Robert Thomas and titled The Rise of the Western World, North laid out the theoretical connection between… Read More »
Donald Langevoort
- Thomas Aquinas Reynolds Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Of all the questions about why the recent financial mess happened, the most troublesome have to do with why large, supposedly sophisticated financial institutions took on so much risk. There are many possible responses, some of which are about informational asymmetries, others about agency costs and moral hazards, and… Read More »
Imagine that upon graduation from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry Potter goes to law school. As a 1L, he takes torts from a professor with an economist’s view of the institution. She teaches Potter that tort law aims to minimize the sum of the costs of accidents and… Read More »
Introduction
In this Editorial we focus our attention on two concerns for Law and Economics (LE). The first relates to commensurability and the second focuses on agency. Both concerns are central to LE. The first concern questions the dominant method LE uses for making substantive decisions. The second concern challenges… Read More »
Henry E. Smith
Samuel Bray’s recent article in the University of Chicago Law Review proposes an innovative category—preventive adjudication—to capture how courts minimize the harm from legal uncertainty. In preventive adjudication, the court issues no command to the parties, applies a prospective remedy only, and applies the law to a given… Read More »
David M. Driesen
- Syracuse University College of Law
David M. Driesen
[This is the third post in a three-part response to Jonathan S. Masur and Eric A. Posner, Against Feasibility Analysis, 77 U Chi L Rev 657 (2010).]
Because plant closures cause job loss, any cost-benefit analysis (CBA) that counts job loss as a consequence relevant to overall well-being… Read More »
David M. Driesen
- Syracuse University College of Law
Jonathan Masur and Eric Posner’s neglect of key normative arguments (discussed in my previous post) stems in part from a preoccupation with flaws in the agency practice of feasibility analysis. I agree with Masur and Posner’s characterization of that practice as less than wholly satisfactory and suggested as much in an… Read More »
David M. Driesen
- Syracuse University College of Law
In spite of Jonathan Masur and Eric Posner’s promise to unmask the normative commitments underlying feasibility analysis, their new article, Against Feasibility Analysis, fails to confront key normative arguments about the tendency of widely distributed regulatory costs to render trivial the individual impact on consumers of even high aggregate costs or… Read More »
In recent decades, research in behavioral psychology and experimental economics has undermined some of the fundamental principles of the “rational choice” model of neoclassical economics—in particular, the assumption that decision-makers have stable preferences. A large volume of data shows that people’s preferences are subject to a variety of cognitive biases… Read More »
I.
The Need for Sustainable Agriculture
Advocates of alternative agriculture argue that conventional modes of agricultural production are problematic because they ignore natural limits. The goal of sustainable agriculture, a form of alternative agriculture, is to farm in accordance with the structure of local ecosystems. This “nature as standard”… Read More »