Plaza A Hilton San Francisco and Towers Lobby Level
Section on Law and Economics Jeffrey N. Gordon, Columbia University, Chair
What (if anything) Does Normative Economics Contribute to the Philosophy of Justice?
Speakers:
Jules L. Coleman, Yale Law School Robert Cooter, University of California at Berkeley Louis Kaplow, Harvard Law School [View Program Material] Mark Gregory Kelman, Stanford Law School Jody S. Kraus, University of Virginia Steven Shavell, Harvard Law School [View Program Material]
In a book manuscript, Principles of Fairness vs. Human Welfare: On the Evaluation of Legal Policy, Professors Kaplow and Shavell try to redirect the thrust of normative economics away from standard approaches based on wealth maximization or efficiency towards one based on welfare economics, by which they mean a concern for the welfare of individuals. In this way they hope to avoid some of the standard objections to normative economics as insufficiently attentive to important aspects of well-being and distributive concerns. They also propose welfarism as complete ground for legal policy-making, meaning that they reject fairness concerns: "Ideas of fairness should receive no independent weight in the evaluation of legal rules." This is because notions of fairness will make individuals worse off and thus should be discarded.
The effort to reframe the debate in this way is controversial. The excluded considerations of fairness include ideas of justice, rights and cognate concepts. In application, it would exclude corrective justice in torts or the criminal law.
An opening presentation by Professors Kaplow and Shavell will be the springboard for the panel's reflections on the particulars of these claims as well as the position of normative economics more generally.