The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Student Blogger - Dispelling the Myth of Punishment Proportionality

A die-hard retributivist and an efficiency-obsessed utilitarian walk into a bar... and start discussing punishment theory. Beyond their propensity for the abstruse, what might these two philosophical opponents share in common? If anything, it will be the belief that the intentional harm (punishment) a state inflicts upon its own citizens be calibrated to the perceived severity of the crimes those citizens commit. For the former, proportionality is fundamental; for the latter, the loss of marginal deterrence that follows imposition of disproportionate punishments would be unpalatable. How, then, does punishment affect the subjective well-being of those who are punished?  That is the question Professors Jonathan Masur, John Bronsteen, and Christopher Buccafusco set out to answer in their new paper, Happiness and Punishment (forthcoming U Chi L Rev), which they presented at the Crime and Punishment Workshop last week.

Student Blogger - Chicago’s Best Ideas: Daniel Abebe and Jonathan Masur, "The Two Chinas and the Problem of Global Warming"

Update: Audio of this talk is now available, and video is embedded after the jump.

Preventing global warming requires lowering carbon production, and China produces a high level of carbon emissions. China gains a significant advantage to its economic growth from its continued use of fossil fuels, but the harms from global warming will fall disproportionately on other countries. Thus, some writers advocate giving side payments to China as part of an international agreement to reduce global warming. Their analysis treats China as a "black box"; the input is money, the output is reduced carbon emissions. But when we open the box, the situation is not so simple. The box really has two Chinas inside.

In the most recent edition of Chicago's Best Ideas on January 14, Professors Daniel Abebe and Jonathan Masur presented "The Two Chinas and the Problem of Global Warming," based on their paper "Climate Change and Internal Heterogeneity." The first China is Eastern China. Eastern China is prosperous, having experienced a blistering growth rate around 10 percent annually over the past couple decades. Most of China's major cities dot the Eastern coast, and the cities are hubs for finance and manufacturing. The second China is Western China. Western China resembles a developing country and is still mostly agrarian. Per capita GDP is half what it is in the East (9,967 yuan versus 19,813 yuan). The interplay between the two gives the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) incentives to not accept a climate-change treaty.

New Blogging Initiative

We have begun a new project of inviting students to act as blog correspondents for some of the many workshops, lectures, and conferences that take place each week at the Law School.  We believe that the blog is an excellent medium for recording and communicating a broad sample of the intellectual life of the law school, and we're excited about the possibilities for outside engagement with internal activities that this project will trigger.  This project begins with a blog post on a recent Law & Philosophy Workshop given by Professor Brian Leiter; over the next few weeks, expect to see a growing number of posts from these Student Correspondents on a variety of topics and events.

Strategic Manipulation of the Information Markets

Just over a week ago, Nate Silver, the founder of the excellent political blog FiveThirtyEight.com, wrote about potential manipulation of Intrade’s information market on the 2008 presidential race. It’s difficult to gauge whether this manipulation is in fact occurring, in part because it’s hard to imagine that very many traders would be willing to invest thousands of dollars in moving a relatively meaningless information market more than a month before the election. Late last week, however, Intrade’s political market almost certainly fell subject to strategic manipulation, this time with a much more prosaic goal: to exploit overlapping markets in order to turn an easy profit.

Peculiar Discrepancies in the Political Markets

At the moment of this writing, traders on Intrade—probably the most prominent and active information market in the world—have Barack Obama at about 53.5% to win the 2008 election. Meanwhile, over at the Iowa Electronic Markets—maybe the second-most prominent information market in the United States—traders have Senator Obama at approximately 63% to win the election. This type of broad schism is not supposed to occur in information markets (or any other type of market, for that matter). It raises a number of interesting questions about why the divergence has developed, why it has been allowed to persist, and which of the two figures is to be believed.

Jonathan Masur: "Hedonic Adaptation and the Settlement of Civil Lawsuits"

Assistant Professor of Law Jonathan Masur (along with coauthors Christopher Buccafusco and John Bronsteen) recently posted a paper called "Hedonic Adaptation and the Settlement of Civil Lawsuits" to SSRN (the paper will also be published in an upcoming volume of the Columbia Law Review). The abstract is below and the full paper can be downloaded here.

This paper examines the burgeoning psychological literature on happiness and hedonic adaptation (a person's capacity to preserve or recapture her level of happiness by adjusting to changed circumstances), bringing this literature to bear on a previously overlooked aspect of the civil litigation process: the probability of pre-trial settlement. The glacial pace of civil litigation is commonly thought of as a regrettable source of costs to the relevant parties. Even relatively straightforward personal injury lawsuits can last for as long as two years, delaying the arrival of necessary redress to the tort victim and forcing the litigants to expend ever greater quantities of resources. Yet these procedural delays are likely to have salutary effects on the litigation system as well. When an individual first suffers a serious injury, she will likely predict that the injury will greatly diminish her future happiness. However, during the time that it takes her case to reach trial the aggrieved plaintiff is likely to adapt hedonically to her injury - even if that injury is permanent - and within two years will report levels of happiness very close to her pre-injury state. Consequently, the amount of money that the plaintiff believes will fairly compensate her for her injury - will make her whole, in the typical parlance of tort damages - will decrease appreciably. The sum that the plaintiff is willing to accept in settlement will decline accordingly, and the chances of settlement increase - perhaps dramatically. The high costs of prolonged civil litigation are thus likely to be offset substantially by the resources saved as adaptive litigants succeed in settling before trial.