Law and Economics by the North Face, Session in Honor of Lewis Kornhauser

Law and Economics by the North Face, Session in Honor of Lewis Kornhauser

Abstract.

Many fields in law and economics have been strongly influenced by Lewis Kornhauser's papers. The session entitled "Law and Economics by the North Face » will honor Lewis Kornhauser’s career and his contributions: "by the North Face" because Lewis Kornhauser has consistently avoided the easy path in applying economic tools and concepts. For the most part, Lewis Kornhauser’s contributions address the most complex, difficult, and crucial questions in private and public law: How do judges behave? How can we aggregate multiple judgments in courts? How should damages be apportioned among multiple defendants? How should preferences be incorporated into the law? What role should experiments play in law and economics? The session’s participants will illustrate some of the areas influenced by Lewis Kornhauser’s contributions, such as stare decisis and the best methods for modeling intertemporal aspects of the law; judgment aggregation and the empirical content of the doctrinal paradox; and ignorance in litigation and the most effective ways to model litigation within the context of social preferences.

Organizers: Bruno Deffains, University of Paris Panthéon Assas, Marie Obidzinski, University of Paris Panthéon Assas and Samuel Ferey, University of Lorraine

Samuel Ferey, University of Lorraine, « Is there a doctrinal paradox in this Room? French constitutional Court and the doctrinal paradox »

Abstract. Legal theory has often compared the functioning of collective courts with that of a single-judge court. With the doctrinal paradox, Kornhauser et Sager(1993) have pointed an unexpected difficulty of the workings of the former: in some cases of collective deliberation, two very natural methods of collective decision, sometimes called issue-based voting and outcome-based voting, here labelled as the reason-based and the conclusion-based method, clash with each other. American commentators have investigated the record of the US Supreme Court with a view of finding whether this paradox was a mere theoretical possibility or arose in actual fact; this latter conclusion has prevailed. The present article confirms it after reviewing the record of the French Constitutional Council (Conseil constitutionnel), which shares some features of a supreme court. Besides making this empirical contribution, the paper takes up the comparison of the two methods and suggests a conciliation of the two methods that is partly based on observing how the Council operates in practice.

Lisa Morhaim, University of Paris Panthéon Assas, and Aysegül Yıldız Ulus, Galatasaray University, « History-dependent law and economics intertemporal models»

Abstract. A general tractable framework for history-dependent law and economics intertemporal models is provided and we give the mathematical results and develop dynamic programming tools that allow to solve such problems. Many usual and classical issues, including legal processes and dynamics, stare decisis and precedential change, optimal law enforcement, can be formalized this way, and many law and economics models are encompassed in our framework. Further, the framework allows to introduce effects that have been discussed in the literature, but have not yet been provided a general setting for. It thus allows to study many effects both concomitantly as well as their interlinkages. Moreover, it is flexible to take into account other modellings that have been suggested in the literature. Moreover, it is fitted for environmental as well as AI law and economics issues.

Mehdi Ayouni, University of Lorraine, Tim Friehe, University of Marbourg, Yannick Gabuthy, University of Lorraine, « Ignorance is bliss »

Abstract: This paper examines a defendant's choice to learn about his fault level and its impact on litigation outcomes. Fault-level information is free of cost and has a positive instrumental value for the defendant. However, self-image concerns can induce the defendant to avoid the information. Information avoidance favors settlement relative to trial. Conversely, social-image concerns tend to increase the likelihood of trial and not cause information avoidance. Public awareness of the incident makes trial more likely, particularly when the public interprets a settlement as a signal of high fault. Contrary to intuition, both the plaintiff and the defendant prefer that the incident remains private information.