Teaching
Law 7831 Spontaneous Order and the Law
Fall 2021
Co-taught with Vernon Smith
This course uses a combination of hands-on learning in laboratory experiments and Socratic roundtable discussions of readings to explore how spontaneous, self-generating orders emerge out of apparent chaos in law and economics. The three guiding texts are Robert Ellickson’s Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes, F. A. Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order, and Bart Wilson’s The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind. Students who take this course will learn how experimental economics can be used to understand how exchange systems work and how rules of property emerge to undergird exchange. By building on this experience students will develop projects to explore different applications to the theory and law of property.
Course Syllabus →
Books
Econ 499 Presidential Seminar
Spring 2021
Co-taught with Katharine Gillespie Moses
Deirdre McCloskey argues that most of the modern world lives and thinks and moves in the ordinary business of life as a member of bourgeoisie. We all, she claims, adhere to a code of ethics conducive for and derivative from commerce—honesty, enterprise, and responsibility. But such virtues were not always widely valued. Prior to the beginning of great enrichment in the eighteenth century, great works of literature valued the virtues of aristocratic warriors: honor, courage, and justice. What is it like to think and act and see the world as an aristocrat? Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late fourteenth-century chivalric romance, serves as our lens for understanding the honor code of the aristocracy. Curiously, the author, who is unknown, seems to use the language of commerce throughout the poem—contract, price (prys), exchange—even though there is not one actual commercial transaction in the poem.
How did a bourgeois ethic, as McCloskey identifies it in The Bourgeois Virtues, supplant the aristocrat-peasant-clerisy triad of ethical characters? Why is it hard for us modern bourgeoisie to understand, think, and act with an aristocratic ethic? And yet, why do we yearn for the aristocratic virtues in our art?
Course Syllabus →
Books
Econ/Eng/Phil 357 Topics in Humanomics: Justice-fying Property
Interterm 2021
Co-taught with Jan Osborn and Robert Gasaway
What is property, and why do we have it? Do we possess objects, or do objects possess us? Under what circumstances, if any, is property compatible with justice? What trade-offs does the law face when choosing the rules that govern people and their things? This course dialogically explores Richard Epstein’s Simple Rules for a Complex World, Lionel Shriver’s Property: Stories Between Two Novellas, and Bart Wilson’s The Property Species to shape how we understand relationships between people regarding things when we consider the possibility that conflict begets property and, simultaneously, property begets conflict.
