Norms and the Law

This book contains perspectives of world-renowned scholars from the fields of law, economics, and political science about the relationship between law and norms. The authors take different approaches by using a wide variety of perspectives from law, legal history, neoclassical economics, new institutional economics, game theory, political science, cognitive science, and philosophy. The essays examine the relationship between norms and the law in four different contexts. Part One consists of essays that use the perspectives of cognitive science and behavioral economics to analyze norms that influence the law. In Part Two, the authors use three different types of common property to examine cooperative norms. Part Three contains essays that deal with the constraints imposed by norms on the judiciary. Finally, Part Four examines the influence formal law has on norms.

Introduction John N. Drobak; Part I. Rationality and Norms: 1. Social norms and other-regarding preferences Lynn A. Stout; 2. Damages, norms, and punishment Cass R. Sunstein; 3. Cognitive science and the study of the 'rules of the game' in a world of uncertainty Douglass C. North; Part II. Norms of the Commons: 4. Norms of the household Robert C. Ellickson; 5. Commons Lawrence Lessig; 6. How norms help reduce the tragedy of the commons: a multi-layer framework for analyzing field experiments Juan-Camilo Cárdenas and Elinor Ostrom; Part III. Judicial Norms: 7. Judging the judges: some remarks on the way judges think and the way judges act Lawrence M. Friedman; 8. Judicial independence in a democracy: institutionalizing judicial restraint John Ferejohn and Larry D. Kramer; 9. Black judges and ascriptive group identity Kathryn Abrams; 10. Judicial norms: a judge's perspectives Harry T. Edwards; Part IV. The Influence of Law on Norms: 11. Normative evaluation and legal analogues Amartya Sen; References; Index.

Norms influence how people act as much as formal law. Norms and law also have an impact on each other. This book examines the relationship between norms and the law in four different contexts - behavioral science, common property, the judiciary, and philosophy.

John N. Drobak earned Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and management science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After earning his law degree from Stanford University in 1973, he clerked for the California Court of Appeals and then practiced law for five years in New Haven, Connecticut. He joined the law faculty at Washington University in 1979, where he served as Associate Dean from 1986 to 1990, and now holds appointments as the George Alexander Madill Professor of Law in the School of Law and also in the Department of Economics in Arts and Sciences. He is the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in the School of Law, a fellow in the Center in Political Economy in Arts and Sciences, and former co-director of the Business, Law, and Economics Center in the John M. Olin School of Business. In his pro bono work, he consulted with Vaclav Klaus, then Finance Minister of Czechoslovakia and now President of the Czech Republic, in connection with Czechoslovakia's voucher privatization of large government enterprises and with the Republic of Georgia in connection with the drafting of a new constitution.