Abstract:
In many situations legal systems use ambiguous standards and moral language in instructing people to behave. In the realm of the common law, much of this ambiguous, morally inflected legal component is associated with ‘equity’. In civil law systems, something similar goes under the banner of ‘abuse of right’ or ‘abuse of law’. According to this approach, part of the presumed advantage of equity is related to its ability to prevent opportunism by limiting the ability of people to exploit loopholes in specific rules to their advantage. Most of the current research on ambiguity and vagueness in the law follows a rational choice approach, where ambiguity is expected to increase the cost of deciding how to behave. This increase in the cost of learning on how to behave is intended to nudge people toward greater compliance, assuming a certain risk aversion on their part. Another assumption of this perspective is that ambiguity is more likely to harm opportunistic and ‘bad’ individuals than ‘good’ people because the former have greater difficulty circumventing an ambiguous law. The present paper challenges these behavioral assumptions and the legal paradigms that are based on them …
Feldman, Yuval and Smith, Henry E., Behavioral Equity (May 20, 2013).
First posted 2013-05-22 15:12:16
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