Alan D. Miller

A Measure of Bizarreness

We introduce a path-based measure of convexity to be used in assessing the compactness of legislative districts. Our measure is the probability that a district contains the shortest path between a randomly selected pair of its points. The measure is defined relative to exogenous political boundaries and population distributions.

Measuring Legislative Boundaries

We introduce the first family of district compactness measures that can incorporate a wide range of internal geographic features. The measures in this family are the probability that a district contains an admissible path between a randomly selected pair of people. The measure can account for roads, travel time, political boundaries, and prior districts. This family of measures includes the path-based measure of Chambers and Miller (2010).

Good Faith Performance

This Article aims to unveil and undermine one of the most resonant truisms in contract law. It shows that a dominant criterion used by courts and academics in applying the omnipresent and overarching principle of good faith is essentially flawed. Our argument is innovative in at least four respects. First, it uncovers a common denominator of the major accounts of good faith performance in case law and academic literature, namely resort to community standards. While not unheard of, this test has never been recognized or addressed as a unifying thread of the various theories. Second, the Article distinguishes two forms of community standards: common views of morality and common practice. This has never been done before in this context. Third, the Article fiercely challenges the common denominator by proving that all definitions of community standards are either theoretically unsound or impractical. This conclusion undermines the validity of judicial practice and contemporary legal theories. Fourth, the Article uses a novel theoretical perspective that can be labeled “axiomatic jurisprudence,” employing tools from a branch of economics known as social choice theory. In this respect, it follows up on our recent publication, which utilized similar tools to analyze the concept of reasonableness in tort law.

A Behavioral Arrow Theorem

In light of research indicating that individual behavior may violate standard assumptions of rationality, we modify the standard model of preference aggregation to study the case in which neither individual nor collective preferences are required to satisfy transitivity or other coherence conditions. We introduce the concept of an ordinal rationality measure which can be used to compare preference relations in terms of their level of coherence. Using this measure, we introduce a monotonicity axiom which requires that the collective preference become more rational when the individual preferences become more rational. We show that for any ordinal rationality measure, it is impossible to nd a collective choice rule which satises the monotonicity axiom and the other standard assumptions introduced by Arrow (1963): unrestricted domain, weak Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and nondictatorship.