Swedloff & Huang on “Legal Hedonists”
posted by Dave Hoffman
I’ve mentioned a few times here that I’m pretty fascinated by the hedonic adaptation literature. (BTW, I was right about the Eagles). I’m therefore pretty excited to recommend to you Rick Swedloff and Peter Huang’s new article “Tort Damages and the New Science of Happiness”. S&H’s paper, which I first read in draft, identifies several common problems in the burgeoning literature about happiness and the law. As the abstract puts it:
In several recent articles, scholars have concluded that early findings about hedonic adaptation and affective forecasting undermine tort awards for pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, and other non-economic damages. In the shadow of a broader debate about the propriety of indefinite damages, the legal hedonists argue that these findings provide new support for the argument that jurors cannot award indefinite damages rationally or consistently. The legal hedonists argue that, on the one hand, awards for non-economic tort damages are inappropriate, because individuals will adapt to any negative emotional or physical state. On the other hand, they argue that jurors are incapable of granting these damages, because they systematically predict inaccurately the impact of injuries upon tort victims.We conclude that these legal hedonists understate the flexibility of the law and overstate dated empirical research on which their arguments are based. First, the law is more nuanced than these legal hedonists care to admit. To the extent it is appropriate, the law allows jurors to take account of adaptation, and more importantly, the law provides compensation for far more than just emotional changes. It compensates for loss of capabilities, loss of emotional and experiential variety, and lost options. Second, recent studies document the incompleteness and variability of hedonic adaptation. This reinforces our concerns about basing legal policy on hedonic adaptation and our belief that judges and juries, acting in combination, appropriately individuate tort awards. That said, we conclude that expert testimony may help jurors craft awards by providing information about hedonic and non-hedonic losses.
I think this is an important contribution to what I’ve come to think of as the fourth wave of law and economics scholarship (marked by neuro- and hedo- approaches to the problem of utility maximization). It offers a nice check to those who think that the science of happiness is sufficiently far advanced to merit the normative weight that it is being asked to bear. Check it out!
March 14, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law
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