Property and Liability: An Introduction to Law and Economics

apply

Next Session:

Mar 18th 2013 (6 weeks long)

Workload: 2-4 hours/week

About the Course

One of the most interesting and important developments in social science since 1970 has been the "discovery" of a consistent economic logic underlying the great common law subjects of property, contract, tort and crime, the thousand-year-old bedrock of the English and American legal systems. Property and contract provide the institutional scaffolding that makes free exchange in markets possible, while the liability systems of tort and crime appear to mimic market exchange in areas of human activity where free exchange itself, for well-defined reasons, is not possible. This course seeks to expose this underlying economic logic through the close investigation of a series of paradigmatic problems and examples in light of some simple but very powerful economic ideas. The course assumes no prior background in economics or law, and begins with an introduction to the basic concepts of property, exchange, efficiency and externality. On this foundation, specific topics in the law, including property, tort and crime, eminent domain, intellectual property and criminal procedure, are considered. Each group of lectures will elaborate on a different concrete problem or example to suggest the range of legal issues and questions to which economic reasoning can be productively applied. The ideas and modes of analysis developed in the course are not difficult or mysterious, but the questions of interpretation and policy that they raise about a subject that affects everyone are challenging and provocative.

About the Instructor(s)

Richard Adelstein graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968, earned a master's degree in teaching at Harvard (1970), and a J.D. and a Ph.D. (1975) from the University of Pennsylvania and its Law School. He has taught economics and social studies at Wesleyan since 1975, and twice received the University's annual Binswanger Award for Excellence in Teaching, in 1993, the year the award was created, and again in 2012. He has spent sabbatical years as a visiting scholar at Oxford, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and as a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Munich.

Professor Adelstein's teaching and scholarly interests lie at the intersection of economics, law, history and philosophy, and more specifically in the historical development of social institutions and the problem of how social order is created and maintained. A pioneer in the application of economic analysis to legal problems, his articles have appeared in scholarly journals in a range of disciplines, and his book on the rise of big business in America and the political reaction to it in the years between the Civil War and World War I, The Rise of Planning in Industrial America, 1865-1914, was published in 2012. He is happily married with two adult daughters and a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs, all of which has given him a deep appreciation of the limits of reason and control.  

Course Syllabus

Part One: Property (3 lectures)
          Locke and Bentham; An Infinity of Rights; Creating New Property

Part Two: Exchange and Efficiency (6 lectures)
          Siren Testing; "It Doesn't Matter Who Wins;" The Coase Theorem;
          Posner's Corollary; Stacks of Flax; Owning History

Part Three: Externality (6 lectures)
          Markets for Goods; Markets for Bads; Transaction Cost; Property and
          Liability; Planning Stations; A Certain Kind of Justice

Part Four: Markets for Crimes (6 lectures)
          Retribution and Deterrence; Torts and Crimes; The Costs of Crimes;
          Efficient Crimes; Pricing Crimes; Sentencing Standards

Part Five: Property and Utility (3 lectures)
          Eminent Domain and the Police Power; Erasing the Bright Red Line;
          Locke and Bentham Again

Part Six: Property and Technology (6 lectures)
          The Competition of Technologies; Intellectual Goods; Locks and Keys;
          Copyright; Fair Use Then; Fair Use Now

Part Seven: Plea Bargaining (3 lectures)
          What It Is and How It Works; The Court Discovers Plea Bargaining;
          "An Essential Component"

Part Eight: Comparative Criminal Procedure (3 lectures)
          Plea Bargaining in England; Adversarial and Inquisitorial Systems;
          European Plea Bargains?

       


       
       
       
       

       
       
    

Recommended Background

No background is required; all are welcome!