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Lee Fennell’s Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life reveals the benefits of isolating configurations in legal analysis. A key characteristic of configurations, or “lumps” whether found or created, is that they are indivisible.
My goal in this short Essay is to show how an analytic vocabulary first developed to analyze insurance markets by Michael Rothschild and Joseph Stiglitz (some parallel ideas were developed by Michael Spence at roughly the same time) can shed light on a range of institutional design questions, from crime to contract damages.
Slices and Lumps, the remarkable new book by Professor Lee Fennell, begins from the title itself to tell a story about the instability of how the world is organized. Lumps can be natural things, formed in a bowl by humidity’s kiss, but slices are often the work of human intervention.
For close to ten years, the gig economy has dazzled with its seeming powers of disaggregation.
While reading Lee Fennell’s book Slices and Lumps, I was struck that the book could have been written using only examples from water law. Fennell’s framework describes nearly all challenges and aims inherent in water management, and connects these challenges to broader questions in life and law.
Professor Lee Fennell’s groundbreaking Slices and Lumps incisively reconceptualizes how the gig—or “slicing”—economy impacts the structuring of work. But it goes even further to alert us to how “delumping the working experience” (p 6) can transform the infrastructure of work, from an individual’s task design to the agglomeration costs and benefits of untying and retying workers to desks, work to benefits, and worksites to surrounding communities.
The importance of aggregation and division in modern antitrust policy cannot be overstated. Illegal acts of collusion are defined by the agreement of separate competitors to join together in acting as though they were a single firm in a collusive scheme.
Regulations, like other legal instruments, often arrive in lumps. An agency, for example, can issue a rule addressing many different subjects, each of which could be split off and issued as a separate regulation.
Law engages aggregation and division in at least one additional, closely related way: law must sometimes decide the proper unit of analysis not just in deciding whether the law has been violated, but also to decide what body of law applies.
One of the many virtues of Lee Fennell’s terrific new book, Slices & Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life, is her insistence that property scholars vigilantly seek out gaps in existing arrangements. Where there’s a gap, there’s an opportunity to unlock suppressed value.
A popular tweet (popular to a certain segment of folks roughly 250,000 strong, at least) chants, “Who are we? Single young professionals. What do we want? For perishable groceries to be sold in smaller portion sizes.”
Spend too long within the pages of Lee Fennell’s Slices and Lumps and you begin to see slices and lumps everywhere.