Welcome to the Class of Economics. We will learn the 'Economic way of Thinking' throughout the Semester. I am sure this will add one more line of intelligence in your life as a lawyer. The below given passage contains the arguments, commections and debate about the link between Law & Economics.....See you on 13th July 2015. Lets see how many of you have questions, answers and importantly, 'Point of Views'. Happy Reading
You live in a state where the most severe criminal punishment is life imprisonment. Someone proposes that since armed robbery is a very serious crime, armed robbers should get a life sentence. A constitutional lawyer asks whether that is consistent with the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A legal philosopher asks whether it is just.
An economist points out that if the punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder are the same, the additional punishment for the murder is zero—and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest of robbers to murder their victims.
That is what economics has to do with law. Economics, whose subject, at the most fundamental level, is not money or the economy but the implications of rational choice, is an essential tool for figuring out the effects of legal rules. Knowing what effects rules will have is central both to understanding the rules we have and to deciding what rules we should have.
The fundamental assumption of the economic approach, to law and everything else, is that people are rational. A mugger is a mugger for the same reason I am an economist: Given his tastes, opportunities and abilities, it is the most attractive profession open to him. What laws are passed, how they are interpreted and enforced, ultimately depend on what behavior is in the rational interest of legislators, judges and police.
Rationality does not mean that a burglar compiles an elaborate spreadsheet of costs and benefits before deciding whether to rob your house. An armed robber does not work out a precise analysis of how shooting his victim will affect the odds of being caught, whether it will reduce the chances by ten percent or twenty. But if it is clear that it will reduce the risk of being caught without increasing the punishment, he is quite likely to pull the trigger.
Even in this weaker sense, people are not always rational.
I, for example, occasionally take a third helping of spaghetti when a careful calculation of my own long-run interests would lead me to abstain. I am well acquainted with my own irrationality and can take steps to deal with it. Having discovered that bowls of potato chips located within arm's reach empty themselves mysteriously, I at least sometimes take the precaution of putting the bowl somewhere else.
But I do not know other people—the vast masses of other people to whom economic analysis of law is intended to apply—well enough to incorporate their irrationalities into my analysis of the effect of legal rules on their behavior. What I do know about them is that they, like me, have purposes they wish to achieve and tend, albeit imperfectly, to correctly choose how to achieve them. That is the predictable element in human behavior, and it is on that element that economics is built.
Whether armed robbers should get ten years or life is not a burning issue for most of us. A question of considerably more importance is the standard of proof. In order for you to be convicted of a crime or to lose a civil case and have to pay damages, just how strong must the evidence against you be?
It is tempting to reply that nobody should be punished unless we are certain he is guilty. But by that standard, nobody would ever be punished; the strongest evidence establishes only a probability. Even a confession is not absolute proof: While our legal system no longer permits torture, it does permit plea bargaining, and an innocent defendant may prefer a guilty plea on a minor charge to risking a long prison term on a major one. Scientific evidence is no more conclusive; even if we somehow had a perfect match between the DNA of the suspect and the criminal, there would still be the possibility that someone at the lab made a mistake or that somewhere, perhaps unknown to him, the suspect has an identical twin. If we are to convict anyone at all, we must do it on evidence short of absolute proof.
How far short? Raising the standard of proof reduces the chance of convicting an innocent defendant but increases the chance of acquitting a guilty one. Whether that is on net worth doing depends on the relative costs of the two kinds of mistake. If, as Blackstone wrote more than two hundred years ago, it is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent be convicted, we should keep raising our standard of proof as long as doing so saves one more innocent defendant at the cost of freeing no more than ten guilty ones. We would end up with a high standard..
(Excerpts from Blog of Santa Clara University, USA)
You live in a state where the most severe criminal punishment is life imprisonment. Someone proposes that since armed robbery is a very serious crime, armed robbers should get a life sentence. A constitutional lawyer asks whether that is consistent with the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A legal philosopher asks whether it is just.
An economist points out that if the punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder are the same, the additional punishment for the murder is zero—and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest of robbers to murder their victims.
That is what economics has to do with law. Economics, whose subject, at the most fundamental level, is not money or the economy but the implications of rational choice, is an essential tool for figuring out the effects of legal rules. Knowing what effects rules will have is central both to understanding the rules we have and to deciding what rules we should have.
The fundamental assumption of the economic approach, to law and everything else, is that people are rational. A mugger is a mugger for the same reason I am an economist: Given his tastes, opportunities and abilities, it is the most attractive profession open to him. What laws are passed, how they are interpreted and enforced, ultimately depend on what behavior is in the rational interest of legislators, judges and police.
Rationality does not mean that a burglar compiles an elaborate spreadsheet of costs and benefits before deciding whether to rob your house. An armed robber does not work out a precise analysis of how shooting his victim will affect the odds of being caught, whether it will reduce the chances by ten percent or twenty. But if it is clear that it will reduce the risk of being caught without increasing the punishment, he is quite likely to pull the trigger.
Even in this weaker sense, people are not always rational.
I, for example, occasionally take a third helping of spaghetti when a careful calculation of my own long-run interests would lead me to abstain. I am well acquainted with my own irrationality and can take steps to deal with it. Having discovered that bowls of potato chips located within arm's reach empty themselves mysteriously, I at least sometimes take the precaution of putting the bowl somewhere else.
But I do not know other people—the vast masses of other people to whom economic analysis of law is intended to apply—well enough to incorporate their irrationalities into my analysis of the effect of legal rules on their behavior. What I do know about them is that they, like me, have purposes they wish to achieve and tend, albeit imperfectly, to correctly choose how to achieve them. That is the predictable element in human behavior, and it is on that element that economics is built.
Whether armed robbers should get ten years or life is not a burning issue for most of us. A question of considerably more importance is the standard of proof. In order for you to be convicted of a crime or to lose a civil case and have to pay damages, just how strong must the evidence against you be?
It is tempting to reply that nobody should be punished unless we are certain he is guilty. But by that standard, nobody would ever be punished; the strongest evidence establishes only a probability. Even a confession is not absolute proof: While our legal system no longer permits torture, it does permit plea bargaining, and an innocent defendant may prefer a guilty plea on a minor charge to risking a long prison term on a major one. Scientific evidence is no more conclusive; even if we somehow had a perfect match between the DNA of the suspect and the criminal, there would still be the possibility that someone at the lab made a mistake or that somewhere, perhaps unknown to him, the suspect has an identical twin. If we are to convict anyone at all, we must do it on evidence short of absolute proof.
How far short? Raising the standard of proof reduces the chance of convicting an innocent defendant but increases the chance of acquitting a guilty one. Whether that is on net worth doing depends on the relative costs of the two kinds of mistake. If, as Blackstone wrote more than two hundred years ago, it is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent be convicted, we should keep raising our standard of proof as long as doing so saves one more innocent defendant at the cost of freeing no more than ten guilty ones. We would end up with a high standard..
(Excerpts from Blog of Santa Clara University, USA)
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