Econ 522 – Economics of Law – Fall 2008

Tuesdays and Thursdays
1:00-2:15 pm
Human Ecology 21
 
Professor: Dan Quint, 7428 Social Science, 263-2515, dquint@ssc.wisc.edu
Office Hours:   By appointment between now and the final exam
 
Teaching Assistant: Chao He, 7231 Social Science, che2@wisc.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30 – 3:30 p.m.
 
Final Exam:  Friday December 19, 2:45 p.m., in 5208 Social Science
 
Syllabus

Homework 1 (Property Law) – due 1 p.m. sharp, Thursday October 2

Homework 2 (Contract Law) – due 1 p.m. sharp, Thursday October 23

Homework 3 (Tort Law) – due 1 p.m. sharp, Thursday December 4

All three homeworks and the midterm have been graded and returned – see Chao if you’re missing anything

Lecture Notes

Lecture 1 – Preliminaries, history, whales, baseballs
Lecture 2 – Efficiency, should the law be efficient?, a little game theory

Lecture 3 – Property Law 1: overview, why property, Coase, Demsetz
Lecture 4 – Property Law 2: transaction costs, normative Coase and Hobbs, injunctions vs damages
Lecture 5 – Property Law 3: public and private goods, dynamic games, patents
Lecture 6 – Property Law 4: more IP, open access vs regulation, how do you establish, verify, and lose property rights
Lecture 7 – Property Law 5: restraints on alienation, private necessity, unbundling, more on remedies
Lecture 8 – Property Law 6: government takings, regulation, recap of property law

Lecture 9 – Contract Law 1: why contracts, the bargain theory, information, breach, reliance
Lecture 10 – Contract Law 2: examples of efficient breach and reliance; Hadley; gaps and default rules; penalty defaults
Lecture 11 – Contract Law 3: formation defenses and performance excuses (and how to sell your farm while drunk)
Lecture 12 – Contract Law 4: remedies for breach of contract
Lecture 13 – Contract Law 5: remedy, breach, and renegotiations; efficient investments in reliance and performance
Lecture 14 – Contract Law 6: repeated games, endgames, and a very quick recap of what we’ve learned

Lecture 15 – Tort Law 1: harm, causation, breach of duty; strict liability and negligence; a model of precaution and harm
Lecture 16 – Tort Law 2: different negligence rules; incentives for precaution and activity
Results of In-Class Experiment (pdf)

Lecture 17 – Tort Law 3: more on precaution and activity; Shavell; the Hand Rule; the effects of errors

Lecture 18 – Tort Law 4: does tort law actually affect behavior? and, extending and complicating the basic model

Lecture 19 – Tort Law 5: compensatory damages, valuing lives (Viscusi), punitive damages, odds and ends

Lecture 20 – Legal Process 1: expected value of a lawsuit, administrative costs and error costs of a legal system

Lecture 21 – Legal Process 2: pre-trial bargaining, trial, appeals; empirical facts about crime and criminal law

Lecture 22 – Criminal Law: rational criminals, efficient crimes, optimal enforcement

Lecture 23 – Efficiency Revisited: should the law be efficient? is the law efficient? Posner, Hadfield; unenforced laws

Lecture 24 – A fun digression: behavioral law and economics

Lecture 25 – Review: what have we learned?

Section Handouts

Section 2 (September 19)