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    Why the Law Is So Perverse
    Why the Law Is So Perverse
    Why the Law Is So Perverse
    Ebook229 pages5 hours

    Why the Law Is So Perverse

    By Leo Katz

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    About this ebook

    Conundrums, puzzles, and perversities: these are Leo Katz’s stock-in-trade, and in Why the Law Is So Perverse, he focuses on four fundamental features of our legal system, all of which seem to not make sense on some level and to demand explanation. First, legal decisions are essentially made in an either/or fashion—guilty or not guilty, liable or not liable, either it’s a contract or it’s not—but reality is rarely as clear-cut. Why aren’t there any in-between verdicts? Second, the law is full of loopholes. No one seems to like them, but somehow they cannot be made to disappear. Why? Third, legal systems are loath to punish certain kinds of highly immoral conduct while prosecuting other far less pernicious behaviors. What makes a villainy a felony? Finally, why does the law often prohibit what are sometimes called win-win transactions, such as organ sales or surrogacy contracts?

               

    Katz asserts that these perversions arise out of a cluster of logical difficulties related to multicriterial decision making. The discovery of these difficulties dates back to Condorcet’s eighteenth-century exploration of voting rules, which marked the beginning of what we know today as social choice theory. Condorcet’s voting cycles, Arrow’s Theorem, Sen’s Libertarian Paradox—every seeming perversity of the law turns out to be the counterpart of one of the many voting paradoxes that lie at the heart of social choice. Katz’s lucid explanations and apt examples show why they resist any easy resolutions.

               

    The New York Times Book Review called Katz’s first book “a fascinating romp through the philosophical side of the law.” Why the Law Is So Perverse is sure to provide its readers a similar experience.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateJul 30, 2011
    ISBN9780226426068
    Why the Law Is So Perverse

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    • 4/5
      Why the Law is So PerverseLeo KatzThursday, April 26, 2012 8:12 PMWhy do I read books like this? I thought the title was interesting. Leo Katz, a law professor, explains some paradoxes in law with the theory of social choice, an idea developed from analysis of voting systems. He thinks law is a multicriterial decision system, and claims that once more than two choices are involved, it is impossible to have a system that is consistent, respects the will of the majority, does not respond to irrelevant alternatives, and is not hypersensitive to small changes in voting preferences. He explores the problem with loopholes; why they exist and why they cannot be made to go away. Why is the law either-or; there are no in between decisions? And why is much conduct that is objectionable is not criminal under the law - ingratitude, for instance? Why cannot a prisoner volunteer for torture to shorten a prison sentence (a win for society because less money is spent on prison and for the prisoner because his sentance is over sooner)? The arguments are sometimes convoluted, and it is not certain that the multicriterial decision making is always responsible, but the book illuminated a good deal of the nature of the law. “Volenti non fit inuria - consent cures the wrong”“The fact that your friend has a claim to something you could give him, on the one hand, and a strong desire for something else you could give him, on the other, does not give him a strong claim to that other thing as well.”“A cotton broker approached him, (MacArthur’s father) desparately hoping to secure the temporary but illegal use of Army transport facilities. The bribe was to be a large sum of cash, which was left in MacArthur’s desk, and a night with an exquisite southern girl. Wiring Washington the details, MacArthur concluded: ‘I am depositing the money with the United States Treasury and request immediate relief from this command. They are getting close to my price.”“Social choice theorists like to distinguish between two types of voting manipulation. The first they call agenda manipulation, and its archetypical example is the killer amendment. The second they call strategic, or counterpreferential voting.”“…by the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel, in his aptly titled book The Fine Line. At the root of either/or, he argues, is our irrational dread of everything that lives on a boundary…”“…the paradoxical claim made by the infamous Sorites argument that all concepts have a sharp boundary - that one hair makes the difference between being bald and not bald…”

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