Law & Society Blog

The morality of the market is one of the most significant issues not only in ethics but also, at least since Durkheim and Weber, in sociology. As is often the case, the more pervasive a practice, the harder it is to describe and analyze. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, in their forthcoming paper Moral Views […]

Joseph Stiglitz succinctly outlines his views on prizes as alternatives to patents in this article Scrooge and Intellectual Property Rights in the British Medical Journal.
Intellectual property differs from other property—restricting its use is inefficient as it costs nothing for another person to use it. … Intellectual property rights, however, enable one person or company to […]

Steven Landsburg, author of an excellent textbook on Price Theory, explains what he likes about Ebenezer Scrooge:
His meager lodgings were dark because darkness is cheap, and barely heated because coal is not free. His dinner was gruel, which he prepared himself. Scrooge paid no man to wait on him. In this whole world, there is […]

Economics starts with a simple premise about individual rationality: People have reasonably simple objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them.

Here’s some useful advice for foreign lawyers who think about getting an LL.M.

In The Case Against Smoking Bans, Thom Lambert argues (among other things) that smoking bans, for examplunnecessary and, on the whole, utility-reducingMoreover, customers who do not like the air policy a space-owner has selected will patronize the space only if they are being otherwise compensated by some other positive attribute of the space at issue ñ say, cheap drinks or a particularly attractive clientele…. Workers exercise control by demanding higher pay to compensate them for the risks and unpleasantries they experience because of the smoke in their workplaces.

Jonathan Wolff proposes the following:Suppose everyone is given the right to buy only a certain number of gallons of petrol/gasoline a month; somewhat less than average current usage. You can use your allowance, or if you would prefer, sell it in whole or part on the free market either to those who want more than the allowance, or to brokers.

Jonathan Wolff asks a really good question.

Check out Truth on the Market, a new blog co-founded by Geoff Manne and others. If the time that Geoff and I spent at Starbucks in DC disagreeing about pretty much everything related to antitrust and economics (such as this, and most certainly that) is any indication, we can look forward to flame wars spirited […]

Here is a great list of online economic textbooks and interactive tutorials. Thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer.