Jules L. Coleman
Mistakes, Misunderstandings, and Misalignments
In a recent article appearing in The Yale Law Journal, Ariel Porat argues that the tort of negligence is beset by a range of misalignments that threaten to induce inefficient behavior. In this Response, I argue that Porat is working with an unhelpful notion of misalignment; that tort law has its own internal conception of alignment; and that once we...
The Architecture of Jurisprudence
121 Yale L.J. 2 (2011). Contemporary jurisprudence has been dominated by an unhelpful interest in taxonomy. A conventional wisdom has grown up around these projects. This Article, the first in a three-part series, identifies two dominant claims of this conventional wisdom in jurisprudence—one substantive, the other methodological—and argues that both are deeply mistaken and must be discarded. Rather than construct...
The Grounds of Welfare
112 Yale L.J. 1511 (2003) Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell are talented and distinguished legal academics who for the past several years have been working jointly on a massive project in normative law and economics. The project's goal is to answer the question: What are the criteria by which legal policies (rules, standards, decisions, and other authoritative acts) ought to...