Introduction: Teaching Socioeconomics

Socioeconomics, as an interdisciplinary approach, a perspective, or simply an alternative to the standard law and economics regime, is finding its way into an increasing number of law courses. I found in teaching a course on women, law, and technology, for example that my students started with simplistic assumptions about the relationship between law, government, and society. Given them a problem - new reproductive technologies, the glass ceiling in Silicon Valley - and they reflexively assume that government intervention would provide a solution. Conversely, present the same issue to colleagues or other students steeped in law and economics, and they assume almost as automatically that markets provide outcomes that are either normatively appropriate or inevitable. To unpack these assumptions, indeed, to have a class discussion that goes beyond polarized responses, requires a framework for analysis. Socioeconomics provides that. Law and economics, based on the rational actor model, provided a relatively simple (so long as one eschewed the math) analysis that could be incorporated into almost every law course. Today, however, the law and economics paradigm includes a variety of different approaches that incorporate increasingly complex debates about the role of institutions in mediating individual responses and the use of cognitive psychology and game theory to provide more robust models of human behavior. Socioeconomics goes beyond the limits of economics itself to recognize not only these heterodox economic approaches, but also the value of a broad range of other disciplines in explaining, predicting, and evaluating human institutions behavior. This Symposium provides examples of how the insights provided by socioeconomics can be incorporated into courses across the curriculum. It begins with Robert Ashford\u27s overview of socioeconomics. The Symposium continues with Lynne Dallas\u27s explanation of the role of socioeconomics in the course she has developed to each law and public policy from a socioeconomics perspective. Dallas\u27s course, which parallels the law and economics courses offered elsewhere, introduces socioeconomics perspectives on concepts of fairness and well-being, and then applies them to a broad range of issues from discrimination to globalization, from family law to corporate regulation. Dallas\u27s article is paired with Tom Ulen\u27s article, A Crowded House. Ulen argues that as law and economics has become more influential and pervasive, the popularity of separate courses has declined, and the difficulty of fitting more into the curriculum has increased. Dallas, in contrast, explains how a separate course in socioeconomics may be essential to underscore its importance as a distinct methodological approach. The second group of papers in the Symposium addresses the incorporation of socioeconomic perspective into existing courses. Ed Rubin, Jeffrey Stake, and Ken Dau-Schmidt apply socioeconomics to basic courses in Contracts and Property. Stake uses two socioeconomic concepts to introduce students to property. First, he has an exercise that uses the allocation of property rights in whales to illustrate the concept of ?rent seeking? or the possibility that a competitive market may induce investors to spend more collectively than they can hope to recover. Second, he uses cognitive psychology to analyze adverse possession. Rubin discusses the failure of standard contracts courses to discuss contracts or contracting behavior at all, and he explains how socioeconomics can provide a way to bring these issues home for first year students. Dau-Schmidt, in the second half of his paper with Stake, describes innovative exercises he used in courses in labor and employment to illustrate employer-employee relationships. Professors in upper class courses have even greater flexibility to incorporate socioeconomic principles, and many feel it is essential to do so. Ellen Dannin contends that labor law presents an ideal subject for teaching within a socioeconomic framework, because issues of law, power, economics, and social ordering have always existed within the employment relationship, and the National Labor Relations Act\u27s express purpose is to alter every aspect of those relationships. Katherine Stone, Tim Canova, and Claire Dickerson examine this imbalance of power in the even more complex arena of globalization. Concern for the rights of labor, and efforts to counter employee power, must now take into account an international arena where the employer threat to relocate carries disproportionate power. Robert Ashford advances an even stronger position, arguing that socioeconomics is essential to understanding the lawyer\u27s duties of competence and candor, and the duty to improve the law is thus critical to law teaching not only in professional responsibility courses but also in any course in which economic issues have substantial legal significance. In contrast, Peg Brinig and Richard Gershon use socioeconomics to explore areas where they believe it is essential to examine motivations that cannot be explained in terms of traditional economic incentives. Brinig teaches family law, and she uses empirical analyses to provide a richer understanding of divorce, cultural differences, and adoption. She emphasizes that empirical work, rigorously undertaken and introduced to students, can confront stereotypes and increase acceptance of socioeconomics to explore the motivations underlying the tax code. He illustrates the role of irrational hostility to taxes in influencing taxpayer behavior and the congressional assumptions about cheating that sometimes produce counterproductive tax measures. The next two articles by Charles Pouncy and Bill Black illustrate the difficulties and importance of socioeconomics. Pouncy describes his efforts to introduce socioeconomics into his business associations, banking, and corporate finance courses and the hostility it met from students. He attributes students\u27 resistance and their failure to support his efforts to institutional racism, reinforcing his conviction that only through more pervasive exploration of socioeconomics can we understand the social construction of race, power, and inequality. Black, who teaches microeconomics and financial regulation at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, underscores the importance of socioeconomics as a critical component of modern economic reasoning. Black, who was a government regulator at the height of the savings and loan crisis, argues that knowledge of economics is critical to those who would influence public policy, and socioeconomists should not cede economics to the Chicago school. At the end of the Symposium, Jeffrey Harrison takes on the role of analyst, reviewing the papers as a whole and adding his own challenges to socioeconomics. He concludes that socioeconomics provides a framework that can be used in disparate ways for law professors of varying perspectives, but the challenge that remains is for it to become methodologically indispensable to rigorous analysis irrespective of ideology

Economics, Feminism, and the Reinvention of Alimony: A Reply to Ira Ellman

Divorce reform and gender roles are inextricably linked. When Lenore Weitzman chronicled the devastating consequences of divorce for most women, she described a legal system that, in an effort to be gender neutral in a formal sense, made no allowance for the domestic role women continue to perform. Herma Hill Kay, in reviewing Weitzman-inspired proposals to expand the scope of the financial awards made at divorce, nonetheless warned against encouraging future couples entering marriage to make choices that will be economically disabling for women, thereby perpetuating their traditional financial dependence upon men and contributing to their inequality with men at divorce. Feminist writers, led by Martha Fineman, decry the poverty of the existing debate, focusing as it does on woman either as equal or as victim without recognition of the possibility that women could per-form without penalty a role that differs from the male model of workforce participation. Despite the centrality of these concerns to any modern system of divorce, Ira Ellman sets forth what he terms The Theory of Alimony without acknowledging that the debate exists

A Consumer Guide to Empirical Family Law

This Article will consider the framework for empirical work on family law, arguing that the failure to ask more sophisticated questions at the beginning of the research has limited its effectiveness. In this sense, Professor Peg Brinig’s work stands out for the creativity of the questions she has asked, her exploration of underutilized databases, and her work’s potential to serve as a foundation for a new paradigm for the integration of empirical work into family law theory. This Article will discuss the way that theory—and the creation of discourses associated with it—informs empirical research. First, it will maintain that the influence of empirical work depends on the discourse in which it is embedded. Second, it considers the influence of Becker’s paradigm on legal and economic empirical research, reviewing the ways that Becker’s influence has diverted much of the empirical work away from more productive inquiries. In particular, it will suggest that Becker’s insistence on a narrow focus on “specialization” between men and women misses the much more productive work that looks at specialization among men in the nineteenth century, specialization among women in the late twentieth century, and investment in children’s human capital as the driver of these trends. Third, it will explore the alternative sociological frames, which premise family change on cultural shifts, discounting the wholesale and multifaceted economic changes that contribute to the cultural shifts. In particular, this section will suggest that this literature misses the complex interaction between economics and culture in large part because growing inequality makes it impossible to discuss “culture” as a unified concept remaking family practices. The last section will provide a “consumer guide” to empirical family law research, identifying the missing pieces necessary to create more robust discourses connecting family change to family law and policy. This Article will conclude that class divisions along with racial and regional considerations constitute a critical lens for empirical research and that Professor Brinig’s work offers a foundation for alternative explorations of the interactions between family law and family dynamics

Who Decides What Number of Children is Right ?

I agree with Professors Cahn and Collins that “eight is enough.” I am perhaps more skeptical than they are about assisting Nadya Suleman, a mother who already has six children, to have more. I wonder whose funds financed fertility treatments for a single, unemployed mom on disability benefits, and, perhaps even more critically, who will fund the children’s ongoing care. I am certainly concerned about the dubious ethical standards of the doctor who provided the reproductive care. But I also have serious reservations about anyone choosing to impose my views—or those of others—on the country as a whole. I therefore applaud Professors Cahn and Collins for leading with the question, “Should we regulate?” and for framing their proposals in the context of a principled distinction between regulations of the type that tend to be federally regulated in other contexts (how many embryos to implant in a single in vitro procedure, for example) and personal decisions better left to individual autonomy (such as whether a single mother ought to have more children). I fear, however, that although the distinction they draw is principled and in many ways persuasive, it is a line unlikely to stick and unlikely to fully address the ethical framework for reproductive technologies if in fact it does take hold. My concerns do not proceed from any reflexive libertarianism. I do not reject government regulations per se, nor do I believe that the market, through the magic of the unseen hand, will necessarily correct misguided decisions to implant six embryos in an unemployed thirty-two-year old. Instead, I question the framework Cahn and Collins develop for determining when and what type of regulation is appropriate. I argue for a dynamic theory of regulation, informed by the concept of evolutionary economics, that would ask not just what kind of regulations are needed, but also how regulatory implementation is likely to affect who becomes a patient, what kinds of doctors are likely to provide the services they seek, and where and when medical treatment is likely to occur. This analysis is dynamic—and evolutionary—not in a biological sense, but in the sense that it anticipates how change in one arena, such as the expansion of insurance coverage, might affect another area, such as the number of embryos likely to be implanted or the need to regulate issues not of concern in today’s fertility practices. In short, I am more concerned about whether fertility clinics locate in Detroit or Windsor, whether President Obama or a Georgia governor appoints the regulators, and whether Ms. Suleman can afford in vitro fertilization at all than I am with having a government official stop the next doctor willing to implant too many embryos