Law and Economics

This Article greatly benefited from comments and criticisms by Jonathan Barnett, Omri Ben-Shahar, Philip Blumberg, Lloyd Cohen, Bob Ellickson, Assaf Hamdani, Henry Hansmann, Christine Jolls, Sonia Katyal, Greg Keating, Dan Kelly, Dan Klerman, Yair Listokin, Tom Merrill, Gideon Parchomovsky, J.J. Prescott, Bob Rasmussen, Roberta Romano, Carol Rose, Alan Schwartz, Peter Siegelman, Henry Smith, Chris Stone, Bill Treanor, Mark Weinstein, and Ben Zipursky; and participants in the Law, Economics, and Organization Workshop at Yale University and the law and economics seminars and workshops at University of Michigan Law School, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, the Bar Ilan University Faculty of Law, and the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law; and participants in faculty seminars at Fordham University Law School, Brooklyn Law School, University of Connecticut Law School, University of San Diego Law School, Washington University School of Law, University of Illinois Law School and George Mason University Law School. For the central ideas, I am indebted to Fred Schauer and Steven Shavell, without whom this Article would not have been possible. I am also grateful for the financial support of the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School. All errors, of course, are mine.

Michael Hanemann provided helpful comments on a previous draft.

Very useful comments were provided by Ken Bamberger, Eric Biber, Tino Cuéllar, Dan Farber, Jesse Shapiro, Matthew Stephenson, Adrian Vermeule, and John Yoo. Financial support has been provided by the Hellman Family Faculty Fund, the Boalt Hall Fund, UC Berkeley’s Committee on Research, and the Jerome Kutak Fund at The University of Chicago Law School. Thanks to Tess Hand-Bender, Roman Giverts, Monica Groat, Edna Lewis, Harry Moren, Stacey Nathan, and John Yow for research assistance. An earlier version of this Article was presented at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Law and Economics Association and in the UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society’s Speaker Series.

We thank Stephanos Bibas, Frederic Bloom, Josh Bowers, Sharon Dolovitch, Brandon Garrett, Bernard Harcourt, Dan Kahan, Adam Kolber, Brian Leiter, Richard McAdams, Eric Posner, Adam Samaha, Stephanie Stern, Lior Strahilevitz, David Strauss, and Jeannie Suk for helpful comments, and Kathleen Rubenstein for excellent research assistance.

In light of the subject of this Review, it is perhaps relevant to disclose that the author received his JD at the University of Chicago and wrote this Review while a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. I am grateful to Jonathan Baker, Eleanor Fox, and Josh Wright for helpful comments. All errors are my own.

Thanks to Kelli Alces, Douglas Baird, William Birdthistle, Rosalind Dixon, Bernard Harcourt, Lee Fennell, William Landes, Anup Malani, Jonathan Masur, Richard McAdams, Martha Nussbaum, Randy Picker, Eric Posner, David Strauss, Vova Shklovsky, David Weisbach, and David Yosifon for helpful suggestions. Rebecca Fike, Nicholas Lawhead, and Ruben Rodrigues provided excellent research assistance.

For helpful comments, thanks are owed to Michael Asimow, Frederic Bloom, Ann Carlson, Joshua Civin, Sharon Dolovich, Jerry Kang, Sung Hui Kim, Allison Orr Larson, Toni Michaels, Hiroshi Motomura, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Steven Schooner, Seana Shiffrin, Kirk Stark, David Super, Eugene Volokh, Stephen Yeazell, and Noah Zatz. Tal Grietzer, Joshua Mandlebaum, Laura Podolsky, Ira Steinberg, Cathy Yu, and the staff of the UCLA Law Library provided invaluable assistance. I am grateful also to the participants at the 2009 Southern California Junior Faculty Workshop at Pepperdine Law School, the 2010 Berkeley-UCLA Junior Faculty Exchange, the Chapman University School of Law Colloquium, as well as to the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review. This Article is dedicated to Anneliese Beth, who was born during the drafting of this project.

Thanks to Emily Buss, Dan Cole, Adam Cox, David Driesen, Frank Easterbrook, Jake Gersen, Martha Nussbaum, Arden Rowell, Adam Samaha, Tom Ulen, Adrian Vermeule, Sasha Volokh, David Weisbach, and participants at a workshop at The University of Chicago Law School for helpful comments, and to Charles Woodworth for excellent research assistance.