'The Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Economics and Law' brings together leading scholars of law, psychology, and economics to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of this field of research, including its strengths and limitations as well as a forecast of its future development. Its twenty-nine chapters are organized into four parts.
This groundbreaking book contributes to an emerging literature that examines responses to the rights revolution that unfolded in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Using original archival evidence and data, Stephen B. Burbank and Sean Farhang identify the origins of the counterrevolution against private enforcement of federal law in the first Reagan Administration. They then measure the counterrevolution's trajectory in the elected branches, court rulemaking, and the Supreme Court, evaluate its success in those different lawmaking sites, and test key elements of their argument. Finally, the authors leverage an institutional perspective to explain a striking variation in their results: although the counterrevolution largely failed in more democratic lawmaking sites, in a long series of cases little noticed by the public, an increasingly conservative and ideologically polarized Supreme Court has transformed federal law, making it less friendly, if not hostile, to the enforcement of rights through lawsuits.
During the last two decades researchers in the field of experimental law and economics have made significant contributions to our knowledge of human behaviour and its interaction with legal and regulatory environments. This collection of previously published papers examines the use of laboratory experiments to test and develop these theories about how people behave, including their responses to legal rules. An important resource for judges, policymakers and scholars alike, the articles presented are drawn from diverse disciplines such as economics, law and psychology. The editors' comprehensive introduction provides expert analysis and insightful discussion of new directions in the field. Also included is an extended bibliography of additional articles to further aid readers' study.
The field of behavioral economics has contributed greatly to our understanding of human decision making by refining neoclassical assumptions and developing models that account for psychological, cognitive, and emotional forces. The field’s insights have important implications for law. This Research Handbook offers a variety of perspectives from renowned experts on a wide-ranging set of topics including punishment, finance, tort law, happiness, and the application of experimental literatures to law. It also includes analyses of conceptual foundations, cautions, limitations and proposals for ways forward.
We present a conceptual framework to better understand the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights. In this framework, potential rents associated with more exclusivity drives “demand” for commons arrangements but demand is not a sufficient explanation; norms and politics matter. At some point enhanced scarcity will drive demand for more exclusivity beyond which can be sustained with commons arrangements. Claimants will therefore petition government for de jure property rights to their claims - formal titles. Land conflict will be minimal when governments supply property rights to first possessors. But, governments may not allocate de jure rights to these claimants because they face differing political constituencies. Moreover, governments may assign de jure rights but be unwilling to enforce the right. This generates potential or actual conflict over land depending on the violence potentials of de facto and de jure claimants. We examine land settlement and conflict on the frontiers of Australia, the U.S. and Brazil. We are interested in examining the emergence, sustainability, and collapse of commons arrangements in specific historical contexts. Our analysis indicates the emergence of de facto property rights arrangements will be relatively peaceful where claimants have reasons to organize collectively (Australia and the U.S.). The settlement process will be more prone to conflict when fewer collective activities are required. Consequently, claimants resort to periodic violent self-enforcement or third party enforcement (Brazil). In all three cases the movement from de facto to de jure property rights led to potential or actual conflict because of insufficient government enforcement.
In the past few decades, economic analysis of law has been challenged by a growing body of experimental and empirical studies that attest to prevalent and systematic deviations from the assumptions of economic rationality. While the findings on bounded rationality and heuristics and biases were initially perceived as antithetical to standard economic and legal-economic analysis, over time they have been largely integrated into mainstream economic analysis, including economic analysis of law. Moreover, the impact of behavioral insights has long since transcended purely economic analysis of law: in recent years, the behavioral movement has become one of the most influential developments in legal scholarship in general. Behavioral Law and Economics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the field. Eyal Zamir and Doron Teichman survey the entire body of psychological research that lies at the basis of behavioral analysis of law, and critically evaluate the core methodological questions of this area of research. Following this, the book discusses the fundamental normative questions stemming from the psychological findings on bounded rationality, and explores their implications for setting the law's goals and designing the means to attain them. The book then provides a systematic and critical examination of the contributions of behavioral studies to all major fields of law including: property, contracts, consumer protection, torts, corporate, securities regulation, antitrust, administrative, constitutional, international, criminal, and evidence law, as well as to the behavior of key players in the legal arena: litigants and judicial decision-makers.
Entangled Things takes the concept of entanglement as its starting point in investigating the relationship between us and the material things we engage with. Each chapter illustrates a particular form of entanglement – desiring things, hoarding things, creating things, ridding ourselves of things – using ethnographic examples and theoretical perspectives. Hulme encourages a wider consideration of the place of humans in the world, and the kind of choices we enact when influenced by the material things around us. She explores our relationships with material objects in light of both personal and planetary ‘space’, and personal and historical time, from the space in our homes, storage spaces, landfill and oceans; to the times in our lives and the times in wider shared histories that things connect us to, not to mention our sense of time and our own place in the world. In so doing, Hulme intentionally places discussions on our entanglement with things squarely back into the context of the Anthropocene, with a provocative analysis in which the Anthropocene is posited as a concept which on one hand takes away human agency, placing us in the context of immense geological epochs, whilst on the other hand pushes agency upon humans, blaming us for the extreme challenges of the current era and looking to us to solve those challenges. For Hulme, material things are instrumental in helping us to grasp our existential place in the world and weave a way through the complications of living in epochal times.
The discipline of law and economics has earned a reputation for developing plausible and empirically testable theories on the social functions and the impact of legal institutions. Property rights are a field in which this has been very successful. In this book, economic property rights theories are applied to case law in order to examine the practice and solution of real life conflicts. The author examines the economic problems which are dealt with in these cases and evaluate the courts’ decisions from an economic angle. Cases are examined from across the UK, the US, Germany, Belgium and Canada to allow international comparisons to be made. These comparisons reveal that, regardless of the legal system, many legal issues have similar economic roots and therefore similar models of economic analysis can be applied. The analysis of these cases also shows that the discipline of law and economics is not only successful in developing explanatory models but also useful to generate better considerations and solutions for legal conflicts in individual cases. This book aims to bridge the gap between the academic and professional literature and demonstrate the benefits of the economic analysis of property rights cases to all those who are interested in law and economics.
With its nuanced presentation of the theoretical and practical implications, this book expands our understanding of how property rights work in today's world.
A richly transdisciplinary account of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and behavior In this book, acclaimed economist Herbert Gintis ranges widely across many fields—including economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, moral philosophy, and biology—to provide a rigorous transdisciplinary explanation of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and social behavior. Because such behavior can be understood only through transdisciplinary research, Gintis argues, Individuality and Entanglement advances the effort to unify the behavioral sciences by developing a shared analytical framework—one that bridges research on gene-culture coevolution, the rational-actor model, game theory, and complexity theory. At the same time, the book persuasively demonstrates the rich possibilities of such transdisciplinary work. Everything distinctive about human social life, Gintis argues, flows from the fact that we construct and then play social games. Indeed, society itself is a game with rules, and politics is the arena in which we affirm and change these rules. Individuality is central to our species because the rules do not change through inexorable macrosocial forces. Rather, individuals band together to change the rules. Our minds are also socially entangled, producing behavior that is socially rational, although it violates the standard rules of individually rational choice. Finally, a moral sense is essential for playing games with socially constructed rules. People generally play by the rules, are ashamed when they break the rules, and are offended when others break the rules, even in societies that lack laws, government, and jails. Throughout the book, Gintis shows that it is only by bringing together the behavioral sciences that such basic aspects of human behavior can be understood.
