Professor Anup Malani on how we know when we don't know
What are judges supposed to do when
statutes are ambiguous? This question is the source of endless
quantities of legal scholarship and is at the core of public debates
over the proper role of judges. While the is obviously important, it
is hard to see how anything really new could be said. Asking this
question - how to deal with ambiguity - presupposes another, however:
that ambiguity exists in the first place. How do we - or any given
decisionmaker - know when a text is ambiguous? Relatively little
academic work has been done on this question, which would seem to be
at least as important.
Chicago's Anup Malani, along with
co-authors Ward Farnsworth and Dustin Guzior (both at Boston
University) attempts to fill this gap with his paper Ambiguity about
Ambiguity: An Empirical Inquiry into Legal Interpretation,
which was presented at this week's Works in Progress (WiP) talk at the
law school. The paper is based on an empirical study of nearly 1,000
law students.
Continue reading "Student Blogger - Ambiguity about Ambiguity" »
On Wednesday, April 25, 2007, Professor Anup Malani delievered a Chicago's Best Ideas talk on "Valuing Laws as Local Amenities." Professor Malani thinks we go wrong in trying to determine the value of a law only by its direct effects - he argues that by looking at the effect that any given law has on wages and property values, we can determine the relative value of all laws. This allows us to treat laws just like any other community amenities, such as the fixing of potholes or the building of a swimming pool. Listen to the talk here, and read the full blurb after the jump.
Continue reading "Malani CBI: Valuing Laws as Local Amenities" »
Anup Malani’s latest paper argues that perhaps the best way to evaluate a law is to look at how the law affects housing prices and local wages. The intuition is that a good law will make the relevant community more attractive, which in turn will cause housing prices to rise and wages to fall. That is, a good law will increase the number of people who want to live in a given community, and that will drive housing prices up and push local wages down.
Malani recently asked for examples of legal rules for which this story sounds plausible, in essence looking for things that might influence a person when they choose where to live. When debating whether to live in Hyde Park or Highland Park, Anup asks, is it plausible to think that people inquire about local land use regulation, criminal enforcement, and the like? With respect to schools the answer is surely yes; but Anup wants to know if the same dynamic applies on the state level to tort law or on the local level to criminal enforcement or parking issues.
Two reactions.
Continue reading "Housing, Wages, and Malani" »
I recently started a paper which argues that the value of a law should be judged by the extent to which it raises housing prices and lowers wages. This may seem an odd way to assess the welfare effect of a law. After all, higher housing prices and lower wages are thought to be bad outcomes, not good ones. But the proper way to understand these changes is as signals of positive outcomes, not positive outcomes themselves. They indicate that something good has happened in the community. Housing prices go up because more people want to live there. Wages go down because more people want to work there. Phrased more formally, higher housing prices and lower wages are how markets ration an attractive local amenity. Indeed, the increase in housing prices combined with the reduction in wages provides a measure how much people are willing to give up to enjoy the amenity. Conventional economic thinking recognizes this when it comes to estimating the social value of a new park or a better school. The same logic, I argue, applies when the amenity is anything from a better tort system to smarter rules regarding capital punishment.
Continue reading "Valuing Laws as Local Amenities" »
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