Courses
The following courses are specifically designed to teach economic analysis of law, economics, or empirical methods.
Analytical Methods for Lawyers 100, Professors Louis Kaplow, Guhan Subramanian, and Lecturer David Cope
Lawyers in almost every area of practice (litigation, corporate, government, public interest) deal routinely with problems that are usefully illuminated by basic business and economic concepts. This course is designed to teach the most important analytical methods to law students, in a manner that will be fully accessible to those with no prior quantitative training or background in the subjects covered. Using text, classroom activities, and written exercises, we will show you how these tools may be used to analyze concrete problems that arise in a wide range of legal practice settings.
The course will consist of seven units: Decision Analysis/Games and Information, Contracting, Accounting, Finance, Microeconomics, Law and Economics, Statistics.
Bankruptcy and Corporate Reogranization - Advanced Issues (Reading Group), Professor Mark Roe
In this reading group we will examine complex issues in corporate reorganization in bankruptcy, paying attention to current bankruptcies and proposals to reconstruct the framework of corporate reorganization.
Economic Analysis of Law, Professor Steven Shavell (taught in Academic Year 2004-2005 by Visiting Professor Omri Ben-Shahar of University of Michigan)
This course will systematically develop and examine the economic approach to the analysis of law. Property, tort, contract, criminal law and the litigation process will be discussed. Also, the relationship between welfare economics, morality, and the law will be examined.
Economics and Public Law, Professor Christine Jolls
This is a course about economic concepts that help to illuminate basic issues in antitrust law, corporate law, employment and labor law, environmental law, regulation and administrative law, and taxation. Not offered on a regular basis.
Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, Professor W. Kip Viscusi
This course will provide a general economic assessment of the role of regulation and antitrust policy in the U.S. economy. The course will have four parts. The first part will consider aspects of the rulemaking process by which regulations are generated, including the economic criteria for assessing these regulations. The second section of the course will provide an introduction to antitrust issues including an examination of barriers to entry, collusion, merger guidelines, and price discrimination. The third part of the course will consider a variety of topics in the area of economic regulation including the theories of economic regulation such as capture theory. The topics considered will include natural monopoly regulation as well as case studies, such as cable television and airline regulation. The fourth section of the course will address health, safety, and environmental regulation. In addition to examining conceptual issues, such as the valuation of risks to life and health, this section will provide detailed assessment of product safety regulation, economic principles for environmental regulation, and an examination of cigarette regulation and litigation.
Empirical Methods for Legal Analysis, Lecturer Joni Hersch
The purpose of this course is to provide lawyers with an understanding of the quantitative tools commonly used in public policy decisions, legal scholarship, and litigation. The first part of the course demonstrates the use of statistics in Supreme Court decisions involving discrimination. In the second part, we analyze epidemiologic methods and evidence applied to mass torts such as asbestos, environmental tobacco smoke, Agent Orange, and breast implants. The third part applies multiple regression analysis to employment discrimination, lending discrimination, and analysis of the legal process. The fourth part demonstrates how the value of a statistical life is estimated for use by regulatory agencies, as well as how monetary values are set for wrongful death, as in the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The final part of the course will use tools developed in this course to various applications based on student interest. Possible topics include affirmative action, valuing the environment, evidence on whether there is an abortion breast cancer link, and analysis of the legal profession. The emphasis is on applications and interpretation of quantitative values rather than on the mechanics of deriving the values.
Law and Economics: Empirical Issues, Professor W. Kip Viscusi
This course is a self-contained introduction to the use of empirical methods in legal contexts. Not offered AY 2004/2005.
Negotiation Advanced: Deal Design and Implementation, Professor Guhan Subramanian
This course will focus on the creation of value through transaction design. The first half of the course will examine barriers to transacting, such as information asymmetries, strategic behavior, and transaction costs. The goal for this part of the course is to understand the generic set of problems and solutions that are common to all complex transactions. The second half of the course will apply these tools to a series of real-world deals. In some of these case studies, student teams will participate in simulated negotiation and drafting exercises; in other cases, student teams will examine and present the deal from a third-party perspective. Teams will include students from the Harvard Business School. For several of the case studies, the lawyers and/or principals who participated in the transactions will attend class to provide their perspectives.
Risk and Environmental Regulation and Antitrust, Professor W. Kip Viscusi
This seminar is a working seminar that will involve class presentations by students as well as occasional lectures. All students in the class will prepare a series of short papers dealing with different aspects of risk and environmental regulation.
A primary focus of the seminar will be on the interrelationship among legislative mandates of regulatory agencies, guidelines for executive oversight, and regulatory reform legislation. Each student will prepare an assessment of the legislative mandate of a risk regulation agency and its effect on regulatory policy. The character of these legislative mandates and the conflict of these mandates with the series of Executive Orders that has governed White House oversight of new regulations for the past two decades will also be examined.
The seminar will also explore a variety of substantive issues pertaining to risk and environmental regulation.
Seminar: Behavioral Law and Economics, Professor W. Kip Viscusi
Analyses of legal processes often assume that people adhere to certain assumptions regarding rational behavior. A considerable emerging literature tests these assumptions using empirical evidence on actual performance of litigants and the courts, as well as experimental evidence on decision-making by judges and jurors. This seminar will explore a broad range of these issues, focusing particularly on how they relate to the determination of liability and setting of damages. The seminar will begin with a brief overview of the principal findings in the psychology and economics literature concerning the rationality of individual behavior in general. To what extent are people subject to violations of assumptions or predictions of rational choice models, and are these errors systematic? The seminar will then consider a series of studies of the performance of judges and jurors. Is there a sound understanding of negligence rules? Are jurors subject to hindsight biases? How do the courts treat corporate risk analyses in accident cases? How do jurors map their desire for punishment into dollar amounts? Are there any evident biases in how jurors set punitive damages awards? What is the influence of anchoring effects on damages amounts? Studies of this behavior are not only pertinent for assessing legal reforms, but are also valuable in predicting how the courts will respond to different evidence and case situations.
Seminar: Corporate Governance, Professor Mark Roe
This four-credit seminar will meet over the academic year. We will focus on current academic thinking on corporate governance, on the bases for differences around the world, and on the current state of corporate governance in the United States after the Enron-class scandals. The first semester will not have a research component; the second semester will.
Seminar: Empirical Methods for Legal Analysis: Research Applications, Lecturer Joni Hersch
This seminar provides students with the opportunity to analyze and critique empirical research and to perform an empirical study using primary data sources. We will begin with an introduction to hands-on data analysis. We will analyze primary data from sources such as the Federal Court Data: Integrated Data Base (this data set includes all civil, criminal, and appellate cases filed in federal courts), the 1990 National Survey of Lawyers' Career Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction, the General Social Surveys, and the Current Population Surveys. We will then examine empirical topics based on student interest. Topics can draw from any legal area amenable to empirical analysis, such as employment discrimination, family law, crime, bankruptcy, environmental policy, health policy, and analysis of the legal profession and the legal process. Students will select a data set to analyze and will specify and test appropriate hypotheses motivated by the relevant literature. Students are encouraged to work in small groups in order to take on more extensive research projects that require combining data from multiple sources and that examine multiple perspectives. We will also have an occasional outside speaker to present an empirical paper.
Seminar: Law and Economics, Professors Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell
This seminar will provide students with an opportunity to discuss ongoing research in economic analysis of law. At most of the meetings invited speakers-many from the Law School-will present works in progress. Outside speakers have included Cass Sunstein, Robert Ellickson, Richard Posner, and Richard Revesz.
Seminar: Law, Economics and Organization Research, Professors Lucian Bebchuk, Oliver Hart, and Louis Kaplow
The seminar involves the presentation of works in progress in the field of law and economics with the papers being of the type written by professional economists.
Seminar: The Treatment of Scientific Evidence in the Courts, Professor W. Kip Viscusi
This seminar will analyze the statistical issues pertaining to the assessment of scientific evidence in the courtroom. Cases such as breast implants, Bendectin, cigarettes, and asbestos raise the issue of how statistical evidence should be used in situations in which the state of scientific knowledge is not clear-cut. The seminar will consider a variety of conceptual issues regarding the assessment of such evidence, particularly as it pertains to health and safety risks. First, what statistical tests should be applied to determine the magnitude of the risks and their statistical significance? Second, how should the implications of multiple studies with possibly conflicting findings be interpreted? Third, in situations of ambiguous scientific evidence, what weight should be placed on the mean risk as opposed to worst-case scenarios? In each of these areas, distinctions will be drawn between the appropriate handling of scientific evidence by the courts, regulatory agencies, and individuals in their personal decisions.
As part of this analysis, the seminar will examine several detailed case studies. Breast implants, cigarettes, and risks from hazardous wastes will be among these. However, special attention will also be paid to the assessment of risks associated with prescription drugs and other products that have been the subject of major court cases.