Academic

Smith on Commodification in Law

By Lawrence Solum

Nick Smith (University of New Hampshire) has posted Commodification in Law: Ideologies, Intractabilities, and Hyperboles (Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

In this paper I first aim to identify, from a perspective mindful of both analytic and Continental traditions, the central normative issues at stake in the various debates concerning commodification in law. Although there now exists a wealth of thoughtful literature in this area, I often find myself disoriented within the webs of moral criteria used to analyze the increasingly ubiquitous practice of converting legal goods into monetary values. I therefore attempt to distinguish and organize these often conflated conceptual distinctions across several registers of moral analysis. Second, I formulate what I consider the most illuminating questions regarding the criteria used to evaluate commodification in law. Critiques of commodification in law face what I call problems of ideology, intractability, and hyperbole, and identifying these issues helps to explain the momentum of the law and economics movement.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 23, 2009 (boomark / email).