The tragedy of the commons is a metaphoric label for a concept that is widely discussed in economics, ecology and other sciences. According to the concept, should a number of people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource such as a pasture, they will tend to over-use it, and may end up destroying its value altogether. To exercise voluntary restraint is not a rational choice for individuals – if they did, the other users would merely supplant them – yet the predictable result is a tragedy for all.
More Guns, Less Crime is a book by John R. Lott Jr. that says violent crime rates go down when states pass "shall issue" concealed carry laws. He presents the results of his statistical analysis of crime data for every county in the United States during 29 years from 1977 to 2005. Each edition of the book was refereed by the University of Chicago Press. The book examines city, county and state level data from the entire United States and measures the impact of 13 different types of gun control laws on crime rates. The book expands on an earlier study published in 1997 by Lott and his co-author David Mustard in The Journal of Legal Studies and by Lott and his co-author John Whitley in The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.
Law and economics, or economic analysis of law, is the application of microeconomic theory to the analysis of law. The field emerged in the United States during the early 1960s, primarily from the work of scholars from the Chicago school of economics such as Aaron Director, George Stigler, and Ronald Coase. The field uses economics concepts to explain the effects of laws, to assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and to predict which legal rules will be promulgated. There are two major branches of law and economics; one based on the application of the methods and theories of neoclassical economics to the positive and normative analysis of the law, and a second branch which focuses on an institutional analysis of law and legal institutions, with a broader focus on economic, political, and social outcomes, and overlapping with analyses of the institutions of politics and governance.
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.
Social choice theory or social choice is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests, or welfares to reach a collective decision or social welfare in some sense. Whereas choice theory is concerned with individuals making choices based on their preferences, social choice theory is concerned with how to translate the preferences of individuals into the preferences of a group. A non-theoretical example of a collective decision is enacting a law or set of laws under a constitution. Another example is voting, where individual preferences over candidates are collected to elect a person that best represents the group's preferences.
New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 (2001), is a leading decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of copyright in the contents of a newspaper database. It held that The New York Times, in licensing back issues of the newspaper for inclusion in electronic databases such as LexisNexis, could not license the works of freelance journalists contained in the newspapers.
The Virginia School of political economy is a school of economic thought originating at the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy of the University of Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of its proponents established the Center for Study of Public Choice at Virginia Tech in 1969, moving it to George Mason University in 1983. The school focuses primarily on public choice theory, constitutional economics, and law and economics.
Economic law is a set of legal rules for regulating economic activity. Economics can be defined as "a social science concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services." The regulation of such phenomena, law, can be defined as "customs, practices, and rules of conduct of a community that are recognized as binding by the community", where "enforcement of the body of rules is through a controlling authority." Accordingly, different states have their own legal infrastructure and produce different provisions of goods and services.
Gerrit Gaby Aimé De Geest is a Belgian legal scholar and writer specializing in contract law, law and economics, and comparative law.
Eric Helland is the William F. Podlich Professor of Economics in Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University, George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College, and Senior Economist, Institute for Civil Justice, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA.
Gary William Chartier is a legal scholar, philosopher, political theorist, and theologian. His work addresses anarchism and ethics. Chartier is a professor and serves as associate dean of La Sierra University's business school.
Sanjiv M. Ravi Kanbur, is T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He worked for the World Bank for almost two decades and was the director of the World Development Report.
Jurimetrics is the application of quantitative methods, and often especially probability and statistics, to law. In the United States, the journal Jurimetrics is published by the American Bar Association and Arizona State University. The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies is another publication that emphasizes the statistical analysis of law.
Joyce Penelope Jacobsen is a former President of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Dr. Jacobsen was elected as the 29th President of Hobart College and the 18th President of William Smith College. Jacobsen is a scholar of economics, an award-winning teacher and an experienced administrator. She began her presidency on July 1, 2019. She is the first woman to serve as president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Lisa Bernstein is a lawyer and law professor. She currently serves as the Wilson-Dickinson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Her work is in the field of law and economics and she is the co-editor of the textbook Customary Law and Economics.
Quadratic voting is a collective decision-making procedure which involves individuals allocating votes to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences. By doing so, quadratic voting seeks to address issues of the Condorcet paradox and majority rule. Quadratic voting works by allowing users to "pay" for additional votes on a given matter to express their support for given issues more strongly, resulting in voting outcomes that are aligned with the highest willingness to pay outcome, rather than just the outcome preferred by the majority regardless of the intensity of individual preferences. The payment for votes may be through either artificial or real currencies. Quadratic voting is a variant of cumulative voting. It differs from cumulative voting by altering "the cost" and "the vote" relation from linear to quadratic.
Francesco D'Agostino was an Italian jurist, who specialised in philosophy of law and bioethics.
Kathryn M. Zeiler is the Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. Zeiler's work primarily focuses on health law, torts law, law and economics, medical malpractice, and disclosure law.
Emanuel V. Towfigh holds the Chair in Public Law, Empirical Legal Research and Law & Economics at EBS Law School and is Professor for Law & Economics at the EBS Business School. He served as the Law School’s Dean from 2018 to 2020. Since August 2021 he holds the position of Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Peking University School of Transnational Law.
Graziella Bertocchi is an Italian economist and Professor of Economics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Modena, Italy. She is known for her work connecting economic growth within a historical perspective.
