The Value of Life

This comment asks, in the context of cost-benefit analysis, what consistency requires. How much variation, if any, in valuation of life is justifiable? Inevitably, questions concerning the moral foundations of economic valuations of life will arise. Section 1 presents some evidence of variation among agency and academic valuations of life. It also outlines three different approaches to evaluation of health and safety projects. The variation detailed at the outset of section 1 is among aggregate, preference-based values of life. The subsequent discussion argues for the following claims. First, the most justifiable, economic approach to the evaluation of health and safety regulation is a highly disaggregated, preference-based one. The value of life as usually calculated provides an inadequate and inappropriate summary statistic on which to make decisions concerning the prevention of risks to life. Second, even the most acceptable of the commonly used preference-based approaches has several counterintuitive policy implications, the most dramatic of which are: (a) It favors the lives of the rich over the lives of the poor; (b) it favors acute over preventive interventions; (c) on plausible assumptions, it favors the aged over the young; and (d) it will often recommend policies that do not maximize the number of lives saved for a given expenditure. The wealth bias, and in part the age bias, can be avoided by using hypothetical preferences normalized to some wealth standard; section 3 suggests a simple, and implementable procedure, of normalization

Governance Structures, Legal Systems, and the Concept of Law

Debate over the concept of law currently contrasts conceptual and interpretive accounts. This Article begins to elaborate a social-scientific conception of law as a subset of a concept of a governance structure. To begin, it distinguishes institutional structures, realized institutions, and functioning institutions. Governance structures consist of institutional structures that perform central tasks of governance. Dworkin\u27s interpretive conception of law extends over the domain of functioning institutions; positivist, conceptual accounts of law extend over the domain of institutional structures. From this perspective legal systems may be best understood as governance structures that satisfy the political value legality; different concepts of law offer different accounts of the value of legality and its relation to other political values of justice

The Value of Life

This comment asks, in the context of cost-benefit analysis, what consistency requires. How much variation, if any, in valuation of life is justifiable? Inevitably, questions concerning the moral foundations of economic valuations of life will arise. Section 1 presents some evidence of variation among agency and academic valuations of life. It also outlines three different approaches to evaluation of health and safety projects. The variation detailed at the outset of section 1 is among aggregate, preference-based values of life. The subsequent discussion argues for the following claims. First, the most justifiable, economic approach to the evaluation of health and safety regulation is a highly disaggregated, preference-based one. The value of life as usually calculated provides an inadequate and inappropriate summary statistic on which to make decisions concerning the prevention of risks to life. Second, even the most acceptable of the commonly used preference-based approaches has several counterintuitive policy implications, the most dramatic of which are: (a) It favors the lives of the rich over the lives of the poor; (b) it favors acute over preventive interventions; (c) on plausible assumptions, it favors the aged over the young; and (d) it will often recommend policies that do not maximize the number of lives saved for a given expenditure. The wealth bias, and in part the age bias, can be avoided by using hypothetical preferences normalized to some wealth standard; section 3 suggests a simple, and implementable procedure, of normalization

Governance Structures, Legal Systems, and the Concept of Law

Debate over the concept of law currently contrasts conceptual and interpretive accounts. This Article begins to elaborate a social-scientific conception of law as a subset of a concept of a governance structure. To begin, it distinguishes institutional structures, realized institutions, and functioning institutions. Governance structures consist of institutional structures that perform central tasks of governance. Dworkin\u27s interpretive conception of law extends over the domain of functioning institutions; positivist, conceptual accounts of law extend over the domain of institutional structures. From this perspective legal systems may be best understood as governance structures that satisfy the political value legality; different concepts of law offer different accounts of the value of legality and its relation to other political values of justice

The Non-Consequentialist Uses of Economic Analysis: A Comment on Dagan and Kreitner, Economic Analysis in Law

Dagan and Kreitner have offered a rich and elegantly written discussion of the normative uses of economic analysis of law. For Dagan and Kreitner, a scholar uses economic analysis normatively either when she evaluates a legal rule or institution or when she makes policy recommendations. These two normative uses of economic analysis are closely related but distinct. Evaluation often starts from some ideal theory while policy design is clearly non-ideal. Moreover, in policy design, questions of institutional competence and capacity play a central role that they do not have in straightforward evaluation. I do not, however, pursue these distinctions here.Evaluative approaches divide into two classes: consequentialist and non-consequentialist. Dagan and Kreitner discuss the role of economic analysis in both classes. The role of economic analysis in consequentialist evaluation and design flows naturally from economic methodology. Any consequentialist evaluation or policy design requires a theory of how individuals, both private citizens and public officials, behave in response to legal rules. Economic analysis of law offers the most clearly elaborated and developed theory of such behavior. In addition, the structure of the theory provides a natural way to make welfarist evaluations as the theory explains behavior in terms of the preferences of the agents