Jules L. Coleman

Markets, Morals, and the Law

This collection of essays by one of Americas leading legal theorists is unique in its scope: It shows how traditional problems of philosophy can be understood more clearly when considered in terms of law, economics and political science. There are four sections in the book. The first offers a new version of legal positivism and an original theory of legal rights. The second section critically evaluates the economic approach to law, and the third considers the relationship of justice to liability for unintentional harms and to the practice of settling disputes rather than fully litigating them. Finally, Coleman explores formal social choice in democratic theory, the relationship between market behaviour and voting, and the view that morality itself, like law, is a solution of the problem of market failure. This book will be of cardinal importance to philosophers of law, legal theorists, political scientists, and economists.

Economics and the Law: A Critical Review of the Foundations of the Economic Approach to Law

Over the last several decades economists and lawyers trained in or enamored of economics have sought to explore the extent to which virtually all areas of the law could be understood as the institutional embodiment of the principle of economic efficiency. This research program has come to be thought of as a separate academic discipline: namely, law and economics. The work in law and economics has had both analytic and normative dimensions. The analytic work has been devoted to demonstrating that large areas of law can be explained or made intelligible by seeing them as concerned not so much with matters ofjustice or morality as with the efficient allocation of resources. The normative work in the field is concerned to give legislators and judges a framework for legislating and adjudicating cases so as to promote further the goal of efficiency.1

CONSTRAINTS ON THE CRITERIA OF LEGALITY

No one denies that moral principles figure in legal argument and practice. However, the kind of role morality can or must play in law has been a topic of debate not only between positivists and their critics, but also within the positivist camp. The topic was brought into contemporary prominence by Ronald Dworkin, who in The Model of Rules I made the provocative observation that the legality of norms appears to depend sometimes on their substantive (moral) merits, and not just on their pedigree or social source. Ronald Dworkin, The Model of Rules I, in T AKING R IGHTS S ERIOUSLY 14 (1977). The observation was intended by Dworkin as a challenge to the positivism of H.L.A. Hart.

Corrective Justice and Property Rights

Suppose the prevailing distribution of property rights is unjust as determined by the relevant conception of distributive justice. You have far more than you should have under that theory and I have far less. Then I defraud you and in doing so reallocate resources so that our holdings ex post more closely approximate what distributive justice requires. Do I have a duty to return the property to you? There are many good reasons for requiring me to return to you what I have taken. One is that while you may have no right in justice to all that you own, it does not follow that I do, or that I have a right to take it. Thus, requiring me to return the property to you is a way of recognizing that I had no right to take it from you in the first place.

The Architecture of Jurisprudence

Two marks of a mature field of inquiry are that its central problems are well-formulated and that its conventional wisdom is sound. Even in the most mature fields, however, the conventional wisdom can sometimes be misleading and the central problems poorly cast. Unfortunately, this is the state of affairs in analytic jurisprudence. Progress can be made only if much of the conventional wisdom is displaced and its central questions are reframed.

Market Contractarianism and the Unanimity Rule

This essay is part of a larger project exploring the extent to which the market paradigm might be usefully employed to explain and in some instances justify nonmarket institutions. The focus of the market paradigm in this essay is the relationship between the idea of a perfectly competitive market and aspects of both the rationality of political association and the theory of collective choice. In particular, this essay seeks to identify what connections, if any, exist between one kind of market account of the rationality of political association and one kind of market-based social choice rule. The market theory of political association I intend to discuss I call “market contractarianism,” and the collective choice rule whose relation to it I intend to explore is the unanimity rule. What, if anything, is the relationship between market contractarianism and the unanimity rule?

Blameworthiness and Time

Reactive emotion accounts hold that blameworthiness should be analyzed in terms of the familiar reactive emotions. However, despite the attractions of such views, we are not persuaded that blameworthiness is ultimately a matter of correctly felt reactive emotion. In this paper, we draw attention to a range of little-discussed considerations involving the moral significance of the passage of time that drive a wedge between blameworthiness and the reactive emotions: the appropriateness of the reactive emotions is sensitive to the passage of time in ways that attributions of blameworthiness are not. There are a number of ways in which reactive emotion accounts might at-tempt to accommodate the moral significance of time, however. We consider the most important of these but ultimately find them wanting. Accordingly, we conclude that the prospects for the reactive emotion accounts are bleak. Our argument, if successful, has a range of implications for legal theory, most importantly in providing a novel moral basis for statutes of limitations and in shedding light on new avenues in the theory of criminal law generally.

Rational Choice and Rational Cognition

There is a close but largely unexplored connection between law and economics and cognitive psychology. Law and economics applies economic models, modes of analysis, and argument to legal problems. Economic theory can be applied to legal problems for predictive, explanatory, or evaluative purposes. In explaining or assessing human action, economic theory presupposes a largely unarticulated account of rational, intentional action. Philosophers typically analyze intentional action in terms of desires and beliefs . I intend to perform some action because I believe that it will (is likely to) produce an outcome that I desire . This standard “belief-desire” model of action invokes what philosophers of psychology and action theorists aptly refer to as a “folk psychology.”

Risks and Wrongs.

This classic book by one of Americas preeminent legal theorists is concerned with the conflict between the goals of justice and economic efficiency in the allocation of risk, especially risk pertaining to safety. The author approaches his subject from the premise that the market is central to liberal political, moral, and legal theory. In the first part of the book, he rejects traditional rational choice liberalism in favor of the view that the market operates as a rational way of fostering stable relationships and institutions within communities of individuals with broadly divergent conceptions of the good. However, markets are needed most where they are most difficult to create and sustain, and one way to understand contract law in liberal legal theory, according to Professor Coleman, is as an institution designed to reduce uncertainty and thereby make markets possible.