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We utilize graphical representations of Dictator Games which generate rich individual-level data. Our baseline experiment employs budget sets over feasible payoff-pairs. We test these data for consistency with utility maximization, and we recover the underlying preferences for giving (trade-offs between own payoffs and the payoffs of others). Two further experiments augment the analysis. An extensive elaboration employs three-person budget sets to distinguish preferences for giving from social preferences (trade-offs between the payoffs of others). And an intensive elaboration employs step-shaped sets to distinguish between behaviors that are compatible with well-behaved preferences and those compatible only with not well-behaved cases.

Criminal prosecutions of political leaders have become salient election issues in the United States and globally, yet few studies have examined how such prosecutions affect public opinion. Donald Trump's criminal prosecution and ultimate victory in the 2024 US presidential election offer a valuable case to evaluate these effects. How does elite rhetoric about the accused leader's prosecution—from Donald Trump himself and from his federal prosecutor—shape public opinion? Using a preregistered survey experiment with 3,000 self-identified Republicans and independents, we test how alternative framings of Donald Trump's federal criminal prosecution affect public support for the accused leader, his prosecution and prosecutor, and democratic norms. Against theoretical expectations, we find that Trump's rhetoric attacking his prosecution does not increase support for him or for retaliatory violations of democratic norms. By contrast, legal rhetoric from Trump's federal prosecutor reduces intention of voting for the prosecuted leader, but only among respondents who do not view the leader favorably pretreatment. Legal rhetoric also increases normative evaluations of the prosecution overall but causes sharp backlash against the prosecutor among the leader's supporters. Finally, legal rhetoric increases support for democratic norms among some subgroups. Overall, elite rhetoric about Donald Trump's prosecution has strikingly limited effects on public opinion, as pretreatment favorability toward the prosecuted leader shapes whether or not citizens are receptive to rhetoric about legal accountability.

Contract remedies have long sought to protect the gains that parties contract to realize. Although the Restatement recognizes three distinct contractual interests-expectation, reliance, and restitution-it expressly privileges the expectation interest over the other two. Courts \"[o]rdinarily . . . enforce[] the broken promise by protecting the expectation that the injured party had when he made the contract.\" This Article rejects both categories of criticism in favor of defending contract law's conventional preference for protecting the expectation interest with a liability rule.

A Modern Legal Ethics proposes a wholesale renovation of legal ethics, one that contributes to ethical thought generally. Daniel Markovits reinterprets the positive law governing lawyers to identify fidelity as its organizing ideal. Unlike ordinary loyalty, fidelity requires lawyers to repress their personal judgments concerning the truth and justice of their clients' claims. Next, the book asks what it is like--not psychologically but ethically--to practice law subject to the self-effacement that fidelity demands. Fidelity requires lawyers to lie and to cheat on behalf of their clients. However, an ethically profound interest in integrity gives lawyers reason to resist this characterization of their conduct. Any legal ethics adequate to the complexity of lawyers' lived experience must address the moral dilemmas immanent in this tension. The dominant approaches to legal ethics cannot. Finally, A Modern Legal Ethics reintegrates legal ethics into political philosophy in a fashion commensurate to lawyers' central place in political practice. Lawyerly fidelity supports the authority of adjudication and thus the broader project of political legitimacy.

New Private Law Theory: A Pluralist Approach is a new kind of book. Nevertheless, the book does have forebearers, as innovation is itself an old practice. The best way to understand the book, therefore, is to look farther afield, to a prior effort to produce a new kind of legal book—the first casebook ever published. Christopher Columbus Langdell’s Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts landed in circumstances that could hardly have been more different from the ones that A Pluralist Approach now engages. But these shallow differences should not be allowed to disguise a shared ambition, which these pages hope to lay bare. Uncovering the book’s deeper ambition will make it possible to assess its prospects for success.

A weighty scholarly tome has sparked a year-long public discussion of the unevenness of income and wealth distributions in the United States. In essence, a few people have a lot of both. Moral philosophers and economists have argued for centuries about the tradeoffs in life strategy that might explain wealth imbalance: between fairness and selfishness, and equality and efficiency. Fisman et al. describe the preferences of a group of elite students at Yale Law School. These elites lean toward selfishness and efficiency more than the average American, and these preferences are reflected in their job choices. Science , this issue p. 10.1126/science.aab0096 Relative to the average American, Yale Law School students are less fair-minded and substantially more efficiency-focused.  We studied the distributional preferences of an elite cadre of Yale Law School students, a group that will assume positions of power in U.S. society. Our experimental design allows us to test whether redistributive decisions are consistent with utility maximization and to decompose underlying preferences into two qualitatively different tradeoffs: fair-mindedness versus self-interest, and equality versus efficiency. Yale Law School subjects are more consistent than subjects drawn from the American Life Panel, a diverse sample of Americans. Relative to the American Life Panel, Yale Law School subjects are also less fair-minded and substantially more efficiency-focused. We further show that our measure of equality-efficiency tradeoffs predicts Yale Law School students’ career choices: Equality-minded subjects are more likely to be employed at nonprofit organizations.

At least since Ronald Coase, law and economics has been deeply engaged with transactions costs. These frictions can prevent resources from being efficiently deployed in production and goods from reaching their highest-valuing users. The systematic study of how to reduce or minimize transactions costs has yielded explanations, for example, of the boundary between the firm and the market, the allocation of initial entitlements, and the choice between deploying property rule or liability rule remedies when entitlements are breached. However, the inevitable frictions that attend to human affairs can produce gains as well as losses, and law and economics has almost entirely neglected the study of these transactions benefits. At least three varieties of transactions benefits appear immediately once one starts to look for them. Publicity benefits arise when features of one transaction become known and are valuable to other circumstances and perhaps to the legal system at large. One reason to oppose settlement and arbitration, for example, is that even if these forms of dispute resolution involve lower transactions costs than adjudication, they also fail to generate adjudication's valuable transactions benefits. Legitimacy benefits arise when the frictions involved in legal arrangements transform the beliefs and desires of those who experience them in ways that sustain the authority that the arrangements have over the parties within them. Accounts from social psychology of the authority of adjudication and, more broadly, the role that procedure plays in producing legitimacy emphasize this variety of transaction benefit. Finally, solidarity benefits arise when legal frictions constitute intrinsically valuable relationships among the parties who produce them. Adjudication's transformative powers and contractual collaboration illustrate this variety of transactions benefit. The three species of transactions benefit pose both opportunities and challenges for law and economics. Publicity benefits and perhaps also legitimacy benefits are well captured by traditional economic models, which might treat them as positive externalities. Law and economics can therefore recognize publicity benefits without changing any of its deep substantive or methodological commitments; and recognizing these transactions benefits opens up new avenues for law and economics scholarship. Solidarity benefits pose a much deeper challenge for law and economics, as they move towards the view that value inheres not in states of affairs but rather in relations among persons. This view is difficult to compass from within the functionalist approach to law that law and economics embraces.

We recently published an article in the Virginia Law Review that analyzed the standard contract remedies for breach and asked how those remedies relate to the theory of efficient breach. The Review commissioned two responses to our article, and it generously offered to let us reply to those responses. We are grateful to the two responders for taking our work as seriously as they did and for helping us to clarify our claims. Those claims, however, continue to hold.

A court - which is the name given the institution charged with resolving legal disputes at retail - is comprised of three elements: an umpire (judge or jury), disputants, and advocates. The court's structural purpose is legitimate (which is not the same thing as just) dispute resolution. No part of the court can stand in for the whole; each is only a part. In order for the court to achieve legitimacy, each of its components must pursue partial aims: the umpire must seek truth and justice, the parties must be free to seek advantage, and lawyers must pursue partisan loyalty. Lawyerly partisanship thus stands against truth and justice - the court's legitimacy requires this. Although rules of legal ethics might constrain hyper-zeal, the legitimacy of the court requires that lawyers' ethics avoid imposing general duties to truth and justice as this would conflate advocate and umpire. This requirement of legitimation is a direct consequence of the familiar fact of moral pluralism. There simply exist no regulative principles - including principles of justice - on which all sides of moral and political disputes can agree. Legitimacy depends on affective engagement with a process; it cannot be sustained by argument. Adjudication is part of this process; and adjudication requires partisan lawyers. Partisanship is thus ineliminable from the lawyer's life. Legal ethics must take such partisanship into account. To do so, it must take up problems associated with the lawyer's integrity. Such questions are not mere navel-gazing but are instead entirely appropriate for a profession whose place in the political division of labour renders conflicts between professional obligations and ordinary moral ambitions particularly clear and stark. Legal ethics thus cannot - for reasons that apply to ethics quite generally - ever be reduced to generic moral or political theory. And in this sense, taking the lawyer's point of view in legal ethics is not a sop to local interest but an inevitable part of any serious engagement with the legal facts and moral circumstances of the lawyer's life.