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Cargando... LAW'S ORDER: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters (edición 2000)por David D Friedman (Autor)
Información de la obraLaw's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters por David D. Friedman
   Ninguno Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  matt_ar | Dec 6, 2019 |  sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
What does economics have to do with law? Suppose legislators propose that armed robbers receive life imprisonment. Editorial pages applaud them for getting tough on crime. Constitutional lawyers raise the issue of cruel and unusual punishment. Legal philosophers ponder questions of justness. An economist, on the other hand, observes that making the punishment for armed robbery the same as that for murder encourages muggers to kill their victims. This is the cut-to-the-chase quality that makes economics not only applicable to the interpretation of law, but beneficial to its crafting. Drawing on numerous commonsense examples, in addition to his extensive knowledge of Chicago-school economics, David D. Friedman offers a spirited defense of the economic view of law. He clarifies the relationship between law and economics in clear prose that is friendly to students, lawyers, and lay readers without sacrificing the intellectual heft of the ideas presented. Friedman is the ideal spokesman for an approach to law that is controversial not because it overturns the conclusions of traditional legal scholars--it can be used to advocate a surprising variety of political positions, including both sides of such contentious issues as capital punishment--but rather because it alters the very nature of their arguments. For example, rather than viewing landlord-tenant law as a matter of favoring landlords over tenants or tenants over landlords, an economic analysis makes clear that a bad law injures both groups in the long run. And unlike traditional legal doctrines, economics offers a unified approach, one that applies the same fundamental ideas to understand and evaluate legal rules in contract, property, crime, tort, and every other category of law, whether in modern day America or other times and places--and systems of non-legal rules, such as social norms, as well. This book will undoubtedly raise the discourse on the increasingly important topic of the economics of law, giving both supporters and critics of the economic perspective a place to organize their ideas. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)330.1Social sciences Economics Economics TheoryClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.96)
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Law's Order is unapologetically written from the perspective of a near-strawman economist: hard-nosed, committed to logical rigour above all else, willing to shave off the awkward complications of reality in order to make it theoretically tractable, and (arguably) smuggling in some rather extreme moral foundations under the guise of sceptical neutrality. I think you have to be careful with this sort of thing, because even when you know and acknowledge that your conclusions are based on dubious premises and simplified models, it's easy to imbue them with more normative force than they deserve. I feel like Friedman falls into this trap himself: although he acknowledges that wealth maximisation != happiness maximisation, that real people are not actually perfectly rational and fully informed, that there are always relevant facts missing from any simple model, and so on, he sure does seem wedded to the pursuit of (a somewhat naive concepion of) economic efficiency, and to individual freedom (of the right-wing libertarian variety) as a kind of panacea.
My other criticism is that, although it is written in a fairly accessible style, it can be a bit of a slog -- sometimes because the pace or style of the explanation is (for me) a bit off, sometimes just because it's fairly dry stuff. It took me a long time to get through, and I often had to push myself to go back to it.
Still, Friedman is clearly a very smart guy who, despite his ideological biases, cares about the rigorous pursuit and honest communication of truth. So long as you take his caveats literally, and remember to actively apply them throughout, I think this is a really useful and interesting book. (