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Educating Homo Economicus: Cautionary Notes on the New Behavioral Law and Economics Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Tanina Rostain
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Abstract

Legal scholars have recently been extolling the explanatory potential of behavioral law and economics. This new scholarship seeks to marry insights from traditional microeconomics with findings from the behavioral sciences to produce a descriptively accurate and predictively powerful account of human motivation and decisionmaking to put in the service of legal policy. I examine the claims being made on behalf of this new approach. I argue that legal scholars cannot simply use behavioral science in the place of standard microeconomics. More specifically, I argue that once empirical findings are incorporated into legal policy analysis, it becomes necessary to forsake aspirations of broad generalizability and predictive determinacy. I conclude that legal policies and initiatives need to be informed by a modest conception of social science. Such a conception acknowledges the limitation of social science knowledge and recognizes that strong causal explanations of human behavior cannot be permitted to supplant normative debate.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , 2000 , pp. 973 - 1006
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at meetings of the Law and Society Association and the Law, Culture, and Humanities Working Group and at faculty workshops at New York Law School and Chicago-Kent Law School. I am grateful to the participants at these gatherings for their many insightful comments. Thanks also to Ian Ayres, Kathy Baker, Denny Curtis, Ken Dau-Schmidt, Bob Ellickson, Don Green, Claire Hill, Dan Kahan, Richard McAdams, Michael Maurer, Jeremy Paul, Peter Schuck, Richard Schottenfeld, Ben Zipursky, and several anonymous reviewers for their criticisms and suggestions and to Marta Kiszely for her research assistance. Special thanks to Toni Massaro and Susan Silbey. New York Law School provided financial and research support.

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