The Economics Of Justice

Posner uses economic analysis to probe justice and efficiency, primitive law, privacy, and the constitutional regulation of racial discrimination.

Economic analysis of law is an interesting and challenging attempt to employ the concepts and reasoning methods of modern economic theory so as to gain a deeper understanding of legal problems. According to Richard A. Posner it is the role of the law to encourage market competition and, where the market fails because transaction costs are too high, to simulate the result of competitive markets. This would maximize economic efficiency and social wealth. In this work, the lawyer and economist Klaus Mathis critically appraises Posner’s normative justification of the efficiency paradigm from the perspective of the philosophy of law. Posner acknowledges the influences of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, whom he views as the founders of normative economics. He subscribes to Smith’s faith in the market as an ideal allocation model, and to Bentham’s ethical consequentialism. Finally, aligning himself with John Rawls’s contract theory, he seeks to legitimize his concept of wealth maximization with a consensus theory approach. In his interdisciplinary study, the author points out the possibilities as well as the limits of economic analysis of law. It provides a method of analysing the law which, while very helpful, is also rather specific. The efficiency arguments therefore need to be incorporated into a process for resolving value conflicts. In a democracy this must take place within the political decision-making process. In this clearly written work, Klaus Mathis succeeds in making even non-economists more aware of the economic aspects of the law.

This casebook provides a means to further the conversation between critical legal scholarship and law and economics. It addresses such issues as what economics can tell us about democracy and the law, what theories of justice can tell us about economic theory and the law, and why no legal language addressing class in the United States exists, and what such a language might look like. It uses the problem of racial and gender injustice as a basis to interrogate both critical theory and economic theory. The Second Edition provides a timely new chapter on the financial collapse, the turmoil in modern macroeconomic theory, and the economic justice claims of borrowers who received predatory loans. The coverage expands to include the following: Origins of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis The Racial Wealth Gap and HomeownershipIdentity and WealthGlobal Interconnectedness of Financial Institutions and The Paradox of domestic discriminationWhat Happened to Economics? The Turmoil in the economics discipline and its failure to predict the housing bubble and collapseThe Inequality Machine: Cashflow Waterfalls and Predatory Loans: Greenwich Financial Services v Countrywide MortgageThe Contract Claims vs the Economic Justice Claims Bonuses: Democracy and Contracts: Listening to the Outrage. What is Fair? City of Baltimore v Wells Fargo California v Countrywide MortgageResistance and Self-Help Squatters Judicial nullification of foreclosure enforcement actions MERS Litigation- How Electronic Efficiencies in Property Recordation Failed the Requisites of Property Formality.

John Roemer has written a unique book that critiques economists' conceptions of justice from a philosophical perspective and philosophical theories of distributive justice from an economic one.

During the ongoing global financial crisis, a lack of moral and ethical leadership in society has been exposed. The Most Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and Larry Elliott, The Guardian , bring together their thoughts on the issues of ethics and morality in business, with contributions from leading business figures.

Defining a just economy in a tenuous social-political time. If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of the world? A Political Economy of Justice considers the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. The contributors to this timely and essential volume look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other—and from that beginning, how to chart a way forward to a just economy. A Political Economy of Justice collects fourteen essays from prominent scholars across the social sciences, each writing in one of three lanes: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; and the roles of institutions and governments. The result is a wholly original and urgent new benchmark for the next stage of our democracy.

In the great tradition of moral argument about the nature of the economic market, Rebecca Blank and William McGurn join to debate the fundamental questions—equality and efficiency, productivity and social justice, individual achievement and personal rights in the workplace, and the costs and benefits of corporate and entrepreneurial capitalism. Their arguments are grounded in both economic sophistication and religious commitment. Rebecca Blank is an economist by training and describes herself as "culturally Protestant in the habits of mind and heart." She has also chaired the committee that wrote the statement on Christian faith and economic life adopted by the United Church of Christ. Addressing market failure, for her, requires that sometimes "freedom to choose" give way to other human values. William McGurn, a journalist and a Roman Catholic, uses his expertise in economics to reflect on the teachings of the church concerning the morality of the market. For McGurn, humans reach their fullest potential when they are free from the constraints of others. He writes that "our quarrel is not so much with Adam Smith or Milton Friedman but with the Providence that so clearly designed man to be his most prosperous at his most free." This book grapples with the new imperatives of a global economy while working in the classic tradition of political economy which always treated seriously the questions of morality, justice, productivity, and freedom.