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About Law & Econ Prof Blog

Posted on August 16, 2009
The Law Professor Blogs Network has ceased publication of this blog.

Markets and Morals

Posted on June 17, 2009
I very highly recommend Al Roth's summary of Michael Sandel's BBC Reith Lectures on "Markets and Morality" -- available here. TSU

Caperton v. Massey

Posted on June 10, 2009
Earlier this week the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Clapton v. Massey. The decision was 5 - 4, with Justice Kennedy writing the majority opinion, and Chief Justice Roberts, a dissent. Here is the front matter from...

Whew!

Posted on June 06, 2009
I apologize for the large gap in postings. This has been a particularly taxing semester. But the worst is behind me, and the best is ahead. Here are a few things to check out as I ease back into blogging...

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Crime and Incarceration

Posted on March 24, 2009
James Q. Wilson, whose work I admire immensely and who is one of the most careful scholars of crime and criminal justice policy, has a marvelous column today at AEI summarizing what we know and do not know about the...

North Carolina and Car Sharing

Posted on March 08, 2009
I'm sitting outside the Weaver Street Market in Carboro, North Carolina (just outside Chapel Hill), on a delightful Spring morning. I've visiting my dear friend Mitu Gulati, who is off at a spinning class while I drink coffee and catch...

Droit de Suite

Posted on March 05, 2009

Summary of Recent Developments in Economic Theory

Posted on January 26, 2009
This article, available at SSRN, by William Ferguson of the Department of Economics at Grinnell College, is a wonderful, brief introduction to recent developments in economic theory. I think that those in the legal academy who are not in regular...

Judicial Productivity

Posted on January 19, 2009
Adam Liptak's column in The New York Times for tomorrow -- available here -- contends that there are credible studies showing that paying judges more, as urged annually by the Chief Justice of the United States in his report on...

New Dean of University of Illinois College of Law

Posted on January 10, 2009
Bruce P. Smith, a noted legal historian and award-winning University of Illinois law professor, has been named Dean of the College of Law, pending approval by U. of I. trustees at their Jan. 15 meeting in Chicago. Dean Smith, who...

Keeping Track of References

Posted on December 17, 2008
One of the great problems that modern scholars have is keeping track of all the references that might go into one's articles and books. EndNote is a wonderful help for that part of the scholar's task. Today's column in the...

Predicting Success

Posted on December 16, 2008
When a university department hires an entry-level candidate to be an assistant professor, the members of the department frequently have widely different views of whether the new assistant professor will be a successful researcher, an engaging teacher, and a valued...

Social Disorder and Crime

Posted on December 06, 2008
Here's a fascinating article from The Economist, describing experiments done by Dutch researchers on the relationship between social disorder and crime. This is an attempt to explore the "broken windows" hypothesis of Kelling and Wilson, who held that when there...

Science and the Law

Posted on November 25, 2008
Today's New York Times has a wonderful column by Adam Liptak, "From One Footnote, a Debate Over the Tangles of Law, Science, and Money," available here. The article discusses footnote 17 in the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Exxon v....

Amusing Take on the Financial Crisis

Posted on September 27, 2008
I have loved Andy Borowitz's short, amusing essays in The New Yorker in the "Shouts and Murmurs" section. His recent column. "Too Big to Fail," available here, is a wonderful take on the financial crisis. You'll enjoy it. TSU

Guinness Book of World Records

Posted on September 26, 2008
The 2009 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records appeared recently. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had this marvelous review of the book by Dan Ackman. You will be amused and enlightened. TSU

Regional Personalities in the U.S.

Posted on September 24, 2008
This article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal reports on research that suggests that there are distinct personality types in the different regions of the United States. I do not know the underlying methods or data that were used to reach...

A Manipulated Prediction Market?

Posted on September 24, 2008
I am a fan of prediction markets -- unless, of course, they are being manipulated so as not to reflect the true aggregated beliefs of traders. So, this column at fivethirtyeight.com (an excellent source of statistical information about the election)....

More Financial News

Posted on September 21, 2008
David Leonhardt of The New York Times is back from his several-month sabbatical and has an excellent article, "Bubblenomics," in today's New York Times Magazine on the financial crisis. TSU

Financial Crisis

Posted on September 20, 2008
The causes of the financial crisis and the particular correctives of the federal government's bailout plan are both a bit hazy to us nonspecialists. Today's Freakonomics column, guest written by Douglas Diamond and Anil Kashyap and available here, is extremely...

CELS

Posted on September 17, 2008
Last Friday and Saturday, four of my colleagues at the University of Illinois College of Law (David Hyman, Jay Kesan, Bob Lawless, and Jen Robbennolt) and I attended the Third Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies. The conference was held...

TV -- Good or Bad?

Posted on September 06, 2008
There's an interesting article in this morning's Wall Street Journal summarizing recent empirical work by economists on the effects of children's TV-atching. See here. Ignore the breathless description of new statistical techniques and focus instead on the empirical work...

Expert Witnesses

Posted on August 11, 2008
There's an excellent article by Adam Liptak in today's New York Times on how different legal systems qualify expert witnesses to testify. The U.S. in unique in delegating to the adversarial parties the choice of experts, with each side typically...

Smatterings

Posted on August 02, 2008
Here are several things that I've been thinking about or reading lately: 1. Robert Ellickson, The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth. The book will be available from Princeton University Press on August 21, 2008. Here's the Amazon.com page. 2...

Michael Heller, The Gridlock Economy

Posted on July 15, 2008
Michael Heller's articles on the anticommons and the boundaries of property interests are some of the most innovative contributions to the scholarship on property in the past 30 years. He has just published The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership...

Parking Spots

Posted on July 12, 2008
Here's a magnificent example of how technology might make our lives better. San Francisco is, according to today's New York Times, installing a system of sensors on 6,000 of its 24,000 on-street public parking spots that will allow those with...

Crime 2007

Posted on July 08, 2008
New York had 494 homicides last year, the lowest since reliable figures were first gathered in 1963. Foxnews.com reported on June 9 that the preliminary annual Uniform Crime Report from the FBI shows that violent and property crime declined 1.4...

Innovation in Law Firm Organization

Posted on July 03, 2008
Bill Henderson and Mark Galanter (and some others) have been writing some excellent articles tracking changes in the organizational structure of law firms. The July 2 "Legal Beat" column in the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about the...

Endowment Effect

Posted on July 02, 2008
There is an excellent summary article on the endowment effect -- aptly entitled "It's Mine, I Tell You" -- in this week's Economist magazine. The article is available here. The endowment effect holds that possession of a good, asset, or...

Pay-to-Stay

Posted on June 24, 2008
The November, 2007, issue of First Impressions, the "on-line companion" to the Michigan Law Review, available here, has a symposium issue on "Pay-to-Stay Programs in Correctional Facilities." Here's a description from the law review's website: "Approximately fifteen California jails have...

Two-year J.D.

Posted on June 21, 2008
Northwestern University Law School has just announced that it will begin a two-year J.D. program. Here's the Chicago Tribune story with a quote from my colleague Larry Solum. And here's a post in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. And...

Jerusalem 5 (and More)

Posted on June 18, 2008
It has been more than two weeks since I returned from Jerusalem and my wonderful experience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A trip to lovely Boulder, Colorado, for a conference on the New Institutional Economics and Law, held at...

Jerusalem 4

Posted on June 02, 2008
On Saturday, I took a half-day tour to Bethlehem. That city of 120,000 is only about 6 miles south of Jerusalem, but getting there instructs one about the tensions that exist here. The tour company collected the few of us...

Jerusalem 3

Posted on May 30, 2008
I've just wound up a very busy week in Jerusalem. The Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been hosting several conferences and had at least two faculty workshops with guest speakers. The Hebrew University is a...

Jerusalem 2

Posted on May 27, 2008
If you have never been to Jerusalem, there are a couple of things about the place that you might not know. First, it's located at 1000m altitude. It's pretty high, and every now and then it snows here in the...

Jerusalem

Posted on May 25, 2008
It is Sunday, May 25, here in Jerusalem. There are several surprising -- to an American or European -- aspects to the rhythm of life here. First, the work week is Sunday through Thursday. Shabbat is Saturday. Actually, it's a...

Something New

Posted on May 21, 2008
I'm in Jerusalem for three weeks, teaching a short course in the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on "The Economic, Behavioral,and Empirical Analysis of Contract Law." I've visited Jerusalem and Israel before, having been a Fulbright...

U.S. Prison Population

Posted on April 24, 2008
Cooter and I have remarked, in the fifth edition of our text, on the fact that the U.S. prison population increased four-fold from 1980 to 2002 -- from 500,000 to 2 million. This is an extraordinarily interesting story in today's...

Conference on Debt

Posted on April 20, 2008
On May 2-3, 2008, the University of Illinois College of Law, in cooperation with the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI), is presenting a two-day conference geared to debt counselors, scholars, bankruptcy judges, attorneys, and financial representatives entitled ?A Debtor World: Interdisciplinary...

Prediction Markets, Again

Posted on April 18, 2008
I am a great fan of the literature on prediction markets and of their potential for policy innovation. Two recent articles are well worth reading for their insights on prediction markets. The first is an article from The New York...

Cell Phones and Poverty

Posted on April 14, 2008
I'm teaching a course this semester on "Law and Economic Development." It's an area in which scholarship is booming. There are lots of exciting new ideas about how to explain development and the lack of development and some interesting proposals...

Defaults

Posted on April 10, 2008
Jagdeep and I have been otherwise occupied for a while -- he with health issues; I with a dean search. But we're both eager to get back to regular blogging. There will be some changes coming in the near future....

New Developments in Economics

Posted on February 21, 2008
David Leonhardt's weekly "Economic Scene" column in The New York Times has, today, a wonderful report on what he thinks is the most exciting development in economics -- the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT. See the article here. Note...

Bill Gates on Creative Capitalism

Posted on January 24, 2008
Bill Gates's talk at the Davos meeting is well worth pondering. You can find the Wall Street Journal's extensive coverage here. TSU

More on the Treasury Plan

Posted on December 15, 2007
James Surowiecki's "Financial Page" column in The New Yorker, available here, discusses the Treasury scheme for dealing with the current problem of defaulting subprime mortgage loans and the near future problem of further defaults as the rates for many of...

Subprime Solutions

Posted on December 15, 2007
Last week's Economist magazine, in its "Economics Focus" column, gave a marvelous analysis of why the Treasury, led by my Dartmouth classmate, Hank Paulson, is involved in proposing solutions to the subprime mortgage problem. See here. TSU

NYT Magazine -- 70 Great Ideas

Posted on December 08, 2007
This Sunday's New York Times Magazine has its annual survey of great new ideas, available here. This is astonishingly good fun and fascinating. Here's just one little taste: scientists have figured out what the appendix is for. (For those of...

Compensation for Wrongful Conviction

Posted on December 07, 2007
The New York Times had, on December 2, this story about some states' attempts to deal with compensation for wrongful conviction. Since 1989, there have been more than 200 prisoners exonerated for crimes they did not commit but for which...

Market Design

Posted on November 22, 2007
I highly recommend Al Roth's new research paper, "What Have We Learned from Market Design?" The piece is an NBER Working Paper; so, you'll only be able to access it for free if you have an institutional account. Otherwise, it...

Death Penalty and Deterrence

Posted on November 17, 2007
Tomorrow's (November 18) New York Times has an excellent article by Adam Liptak, summarizing the recent scholarly literature on the deterrent effect of capital punishment. Liptak very helpfully includes links to the most recent literature on the topic...

Criminal Profiling

Posted on November 15, 2007
In the November 12, 2007, New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell has a marvelous article -- "Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy," available here. The article is a devastating critique of criminal profilers. Here's an example of the sort of guidance...