Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Economics of Restatement and of Common Law

The Economics of the Restatement and of the Common LawKeith N. Hylton, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, Boston University; Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law, July 2013 Boston Univ. School of Law, Law and Economics Research Paper No. 13-34

“The common law process appears to have checks and balances that prevent the self-interest of a particular embedded actor (judge or lawyer) from having a substantial distortive effect. The question that follows is whether the Restatement project is also immune, to the same extent as the common law, from the self-interested incentives of actors involved in its creation. I argue that the Restatement process is far more vulnerable to distortion from self-interest than is the common law process.”

Leave a reply