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Over the past two decades, the United States has seen an intense debate about the composition of the federal judiciary. Are judges "activists"? Should they stop "legislating from the bench"? Are they abusing their authority? Or are they protecting fundamental rights, in a way that is indispensable in a free society? Are Judges Political? cuts through the noise by looking at what judges actually do. Drawing on a unique data set consisting of thousands of judicial votes, Cass Sunstein and his colleagues analyze the influence of ideology on judicial voting, principally in the courts of appeal. They focus on two questions: Do judges appointed by Republican Presidents vote differently from Democr...
Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in the number and magnitude of punitive damages verdicts rendered by juries in civil trials. Probably the most extraordinary example is the July 2000 award of $144.8 billion in the Florida class action lawsuit brought against cigarette manufacturers. Or consider two recent verdicts against the auto manufacturer BMW in Alabama. In identical cases, argued in the same court before the same judge, one jury awarded $4 million in punitive damages, while the other awarded no punitive damages at all. In cases involving accidents, civil rights, and the environment, multimillion-dollar punitive awards have been a subject of inte...
Over the past 20 years, cognitive neuroscience has revolutionized our ability to understand the nature of human thought. Working with the understandings of traditional psychology, the new brain science is transforming many disciplines, from economics to literary theory. These developments are now affecting the law and there is an upsurge of interest in the potential of neuroscience to contribute to our understanding of criminal and civil law and our system of justice in general. The international and interdisciplinary chapters in this volume are written by experts in criminal behaviour, civil law and jurisprudence. They concentrate on the potential of neuroscience to increase our understanding of blame and responsibility in such areas as juveniles and the death penalty, evidence and procedure, neurological enhancement and treatment, property, end-of-life choices, contracting and the effects of words and pictures in law. This collection suggests that legal scholarship and practice will be increasingly enriched by an interdisciplinary study of law, mind and brain and is a valuable addition to the emerging field of neurolaw.
Surely everyone wants to know the source of happiness, and indeed, economists and social scientists are increasingly interested in the study and effects of subjective well-being. Putting forward a rigorous method and new data for measuring, comparing, and analyzing the relationship between well-being and the way people spend their time—across countries, demographic groups, and history—this book will help set the agenda of research and policy for decades to come. It does so by introducing a system of National Time Accounting (NTA), which relies on individuals’ own evaluations of their emotional experiences during various uses of time, a distinct departure from subjective measures such as life satisfaction and objective measures such as the Gross Domestic Product. A distinguished group of contributors here summarize the NTA method, provide illustrative findings about well-being based on NTA, and subject the approach to a rigorous conceptual and methodological critique that advances the field. As subjective well-being is topical in economics, psychology, and other social sciences, this book should have cross-disciplinary appeal.
While the current conversation about work-family balance and “having it all” tends to focus on women, both men and women are harmed when conditions make it impossible to balance meaningful work with family life. Yet, both will benefit from re-evaluating what it means to have it all and fighting for changes in their relationships and society to make greater equality possible. Here, Miriam Liss and Holly Hollomon Schiffrin discuss the ways in which we all define “having it all” and how we can obtain it for ourselves through a better evaluation of what we want from ourselves, our families, our jobs, and each other. Determining a 50/50 division of labor around the house may not be the th...
Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behavior, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behavior. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement. This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the University of California at Berkeley, provides a provocative and constructive engagement between economists and psychologists on the elicitation of preferences.
In the past few decades, economic analysis of law has been challenged by a growing body of experimental and empirical studies that attest to prevalent and systematic deviations from the assumptions of economic rationality. While the findings on bounded rationality and heuristics and biases were initially perceived as antithetical to standard economic and legal-economic analysis, over time they have been largely integrated into mainstream economic analysis, including economic analysis of law. Moreover, the impact of behavioral insights has long since transcended purely economic analysis of law: in recent years, the behavioral movement has become one of the most influential developments in leg...
An “illuminating” study that reveals the different ways social change occurs—for readers of Freakonomics and Thinking, Fast and Slow (The New York Times) How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology, and other fields, Cass Sunstein casts a bright new light on how change happens. Sunstein focuses on the crucial role of social norms—and on their frequent c...
Since the earliest days of philosophy, thinkers have debated the meaning of the term happiness and the nature of the good life. But it is only in recent years that the study of happiness—or “hedonics”—has developed into a formal field of inquiry, cutting across a broad range of disciplines and offering insights into a variety of crucial questions of law and public policy. Law and Happinessbrings together the best and most influential thinkers in the field to explore the question of what makes up happiness—and what factors can be demonstrated to increase or decrease it. Martha Nussbaum offers an account of the way that hedonics can productively be applied to psychology, Cass R. Suns...
Democracies put political power in the hands of the people. But why should people have a say in the operations of the states that govern them? Are democratic states preferable to non-democratic states? If so, is there something intrinsically good about democracy, or does it merely serve an instrumental role? By what procedures should citizens’ votes be counted? How do we keep the voices of the ignorant from drowning out those of the wise? These, as well as other related questions, are explored in this timely anthology of forty historical and contemporary readings. Short introductions preceding each reading and a general introduction increase student comprehension across the spectrum of readings. With each reading edited for length and accessibility, this volume is ideal for both the undergraduate and graduate students in political theory and philosophy courses.