Sticky Compliance: An Endowment Account of Expressive Law

This Article extends the literature on expressive law by developing a model of compliance rooted in the endowment effect. The central premise of the model is that compliance with legal rules, while costly from an ex ante perspective, may also endow individuals with a stream of benefits whose ex post value will increase. Examples of compliance-related benefits would include reductions in risk to one’s own health and safety, enhanced reputation (as a law-abiding individual), and even tangible goods. Under this novel account, once an individual has complied with a law, received some associated benefits, and grown attached to such benefits via the endowment effect, violating the law might thereafter entail a net economic loss—even without the sanction that induced compliance in the first place. While the initial threat of sanction plays a key role in this story, the law’s capacity to change individual endowments through forced compliance, and in turn alter preferences, is the expressive engine of the endowment model. The upshot is not only that the compliance decision is about more than just costs, narrowly conceived; it is that the very act of compliance at one time might change the entire cost structure for future decisions about compliance. The Article distinguishes the endowment model from other expressive accounts and offers a series of antismoking examples as suggestive evidence of the model in action

Sticky Compliance: An Endowment Account of Expressive Law

This Article extends the literature on expressive law by developing a model of compliance rooted in the endowment effect. The central premise of the model is that compliance with legal rules, while costly from an ex ante perspective, may also endow individuals with a stream of benefits whose ex post value will increase. Examples of compliance-related benefits would include reductions in risk to one’s own health and safety, enhanced reputation (as a law-abiding individual), and even tangible goods. Under this novel account, once an individual has complied with a law, received some associated benefits, and grown attached to such benefits via the endowment effect, violating the law might thereafter entail a net economic loss—even without the sanction that induced compliance in the first place. While the initial threat of sanction plays a key role in this story, the law’s capacity to change individual endowments through forced compliance, and in turn alter preferences, is the expressive engine of the endowment model. The upshot is not only that the compliance decision is about more than just costs, narrowly conceived; it is that the very act of compliance at one time might change the entire cost structure for future decisions about compliance. The Article distinguishes the endowment model from other expressive accounts and offers a series of antismoking examples as suggestive evidence of the model in action

Fibrosis, gene expression and orbital inflammatory disease

BACKGROUND/AIMS: To clarify the pathogenesis of fibrosis in inflammatory orbital diseases, we analyzed the gene expression in orbital biopsies and compared our results to those reported for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. METHODS: We collected 140 biopsies from 138 patients (58 lacrimal gland; 82 orbital fat). Diagnoses included healthy controls (n=27), nonspecific orbital inflammation (NSOI) (n=61), thyroid eye disease (TED) (n=29), sarcoidosis (n=14), and granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA) (n=7). Fibrosis was scored on a zero to three scale by two expert, ophthalmic pathologists. Gene expression was quantified using Affymetrix U133 plus 2.0 microarray. RESULTS: Within orbital fat, fibrosis was greatest among subjects with GPA (2.75±0.46) and significantly increased in tissue from subjects with GPA, NSOI, or sarcoidosis (p<0.01), but not for TED, compared to healthy controls (1.13±0.69). For lacrimal gland, the average score among controls (1.36±0.48) did not differ statistically from any of the 4 disease groups. Seventy-three probe sets identified transcripts correlating with fibrosis in orbital fat (false discovery rate < 0.05) after accounting for batch effects, disease type, age and sex. Transcripts with increased expression included fibronectin, lumican, thrombospondin, and collagen types I and VIII, each of which has been reported upregulated in pulmonary fibrosis. CONCLUSION: A pathologist's recognition of fibrosis in orbital tissue correlates well with increased expression of transcripts considered essential in fibrosis. Many of the transcripts implicated in orbital fibrosis have been previously implicated in pulmonary fibrosis. TED differs from other causes of orbital fat inflammation in that fibrosis is not a major component. Marked fibrosis is less common in the lacrimal gland compared to orbital adipose tissue