Law & Society Blog

First, supra-competitive prices as a result of market power are inefficient, because now there are units whose marginal utility exceed marginal cost that are not being made and cannot travel to those who value them most…. So it may well be more beneficial for society, at least in the long run (which is getting increasingly shorter, another implication of Moore’s Law) to trade some allocative and productive efficiency for greater corporate profits, if such profits and the additional capital that they attract are being re-invested in research and development.Against this backdrop, it seems that the discussion about the goals of antitrust and economic policy would benefit if we abandoned the “consumer welfare‚Äù or “consumer benefit‚Äù rhetoric for more explicit statements about how we want to make the pie (that is, what kind of efficiencies we promote), and how we propose to slice it (that is, what distributive mechanism and criteria we prefer).

Does it matter to the citizens, as the potential victims of crime, whether the state embraces a consequentialist or retributivist theory of punishment? Is a consequentialist theory of punishment even escapable? Responding to the call to re-examine consequentialist theories of punishment, let me take you along a series of steps, starting with my right to […]

The Wild West and duels are a staple of American popular culture. In Westerns, the duel marks the show-down between good and bad. But not only good and bad: The duel also marks the edge of the law. It is lawful to shoot the man who drew first; drawing first and killing is murder.
The duel […]

Having just finished reading Michael Pawlik’s marvelous new book Person, Subjekt, B??rger (Person, Subject, Citizen), one of the most sophisticated defenses of a retributivist theory of punishment so far in both the English and German literature, I feel compelled to re-examine whether the arguments for a consequentialist theory of punishment are really defective. Most retributivists, […]