Saul Levmore

Online
Essay
Search Strategy, Sampling, and Competition Law
Saul Levmore
Saul Levmore is the William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Search costs matter and are reflected in many areas of law. For example, most disclosure requirements economize on search costs. A homeowner who must disclose the presence of termites saves a potential buyer, and perhaps many such buyers, from spending money to search, or inspect, the property. Similarly, requirements to reveal expected miles per gallon, or risks posed by a drug, economize on search costs. But these examples point to simple strategies and costs that can be minimized or entirely avoided with some legal intervention. Law can do better and take account of more subtle things once sophisticated search strategies are understood. This Essay introduces such search strategies and their implications for law.

Print
Article
v88.2
Competing Algorithms for Law: Sentencing, Admissions, and Employment
Saul Levmore
William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School.

We benefited from discussions with colleagues at a University of Chicago Law School workshop and with Concetta Balestra Fagan and Eliot Levmore.

Frank Fagan
Associate Professor of Law, EDHEC Business School, France.

When the past is thought to predict the future, it is unsurprising that machine learning, with access to large data sets, wins prediction contests when competing against an individual, including a judge. Just as computers predict next week’s weather better than any human working alone, at least one study shows that machine learning can make better decisions than can judges when deciding whether or not to grant bail.

Print
Article
86 Special
Richard Posner, the Decline of the Common Law, and the Negligence Principle
Saul Levmore
William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor, The University of Chicago Law School.

I am grateful to Lee Fennell, Daniel Hemel, Ariel Porat, and Claire Horrell for rewarding conversations and suggestions.

Richard Posner was certainly the most able judge in the history of tort law and in the development and deployment of law and economics.

2
Essay
Ambiguous Statutes
Saul Levmore
William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School

I benefited greatly from conversations with Zak Rosenfield, Rosalind Dixon, and Julie Roin.