ABSTRACT
Most legal stories are generally about identifying wrongdoers and vindicating the rights of victims, but what if legal wrongs are jointly-caused? It was Ronald Coase who first proposed this novel and unorthodox counter-narrative to the standard victim-wrongdoer story in law. Researching and writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Professor Coase – an obscure, middle-aged English economist at the time – revisited a number of leading nuisance cases. Coase then used these old cases to create a compelling but controversial legal counter-narrative: compelling because Coase’s parable forever changed the way many economists and lawyers see the law; controversial because harms are conceptualized as a ‘reciprocal’ problem: whenever one party accuses another party of harming them, it is almost always the case that both parties are responsible for the harm – that is the essence of Coase’s parable.
Guerra-Pujol, FE, Coase’s Parable (September 5, 2022), Mercer Law Review Forthcoming.
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