Law, Economics, and Morality

"For far too long, normative legal theory has been unable to move beyond unproductive debates. Eyal Zamir and Barak Medina have been at work on another way-an approach to cost benefit analysis that is sensitive to moral constraints and permissions but preserves the rigor and formalization that are among the chief virtues of the economic analysis of law. Transcending the fairness-versus-welfare debate, the authors have written an erudite, careful, and truly original book that must be read by legal economists and their critics." --Lawrence B. Solum Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, John E. Cribbet Professor, University of Illinois College of Law "This book proposes a rigorous decision procedure for evaluating government projects on the basis of both their impact on public well-being and their consistency with deontological commitments. The authors make their case with meticulous care, and offer the best hope for bridging the divide between cost-benefit analysts and their foes. Everyone interested in that debate should read this book." --Eric Posner Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School "This is a clear, sophisticated, and illuminating defense of threshold deontology, a moral stance as important in practice as it is in theory. The authors manage to be both rigorous and reasonable, itself an unusual feat. Their work deserves to be, and will be, highly influential in legal theory and elsewhere." -- Adrian Vermeule John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School "Economists and moral philosophers have long been talking mostly at each other about vital issues of law and public policy. Enter Zamir and Medina, who elegantly integrate philosophical insight with the economists' rigor to create a unified discourse that promises to invigorate and deepen the academic discussion of law and policy in the years to come." -- Meir Dan-Cohen Milo Reese Robbins Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law