The Pursuit of Justice Law and Economics of Legal Institutions [Hardcover]

The Pursuit of Justice is a realistic yet hopeful analysis of how the law works in practice rather than in theory. The multi-chapter discussion recognizes that decision makers in the law - judges, lawyers, juries, police, forensic experts and more - respond systematically to the incentive structures with which they are confronted.An Introduction to the Pursuit of Justice;? E.J.Lopez The Rise of Government Law Enforcement in England;? N.Currott Electoral Pressures and the Legal System: Friends or Foes?;? R.S.Sobel Romancing Forensics: Legal Failure in Forensic Science Administration;? R.G.Koppl Judicial Checks on Corruption;? A.Cordis Effects of Judicial Selection on Criminal Sentencing;? A.Tomic Economic Development Takings as Government Failure;?I.Somin On the Impossibility of 'Just Compensation' When Property is Taken;? J.Br?tland The Lawyer-Judge Hypothesis;? B.H.Barton Class Action Rent Extraction;? J.Haymond Cy Pres and its Predators;? C.N.W.Keckler Licensing Lawyers: Failure in the Provision of Legal Services;? A.B.Summers

The American legal system is not just fraying at the edges, in some ways it is fundamentally broken. The Pursuit of Justice is a cutting-edge look at what went wrong and where to go from here. Everyone interested in law and economics should read it. - Tyler Cowen, Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics, George Mason University, co-author, MarginalRevolution.com

The Pursuit of Justice does a wonderful job of using modern methods of social science to examine the actual effects of law, as differentiated from its apparent intent. People do not simply obey or disobey laws; rather, they react to the incentives implied in the law. Those incentives often produce results that differ from what is legally mandated, because people may have an incentive to find loopholes in the law and because laws often have unintended secondary effects. By taking into account the actual effects of the legal system, this volume offers substantl##