Simple Rules for a Complex World

Richard Allen EPSTEIN

Harvard University Press, Mar 25, 1997 - Law - 361 pages

Too many laws, too many lawyers--that's the necessary consequence of a complex society, or so conventional wisdom has it. Countless pundits insist that any call for legal simplification smacks of nostalgia, sentimentality, or naiveté. But the conventional view, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein tells us, has it exactly backward. The richer texture of modern society allows for more individual freedom and choice. And it allows us to organize a comprehensive legal order capable of meeting the technological and social challenges of today on the basis of just six core principles. In this book, Epstein demonstrates how.

The first four rules, which regulate human interactions in ordinary social life, concern the autonomy of the individual, property, contract, and tort. Taken together these rules establish and protect consistent entitlements over all resources, both human and natural. These rules are backstopped by two more rules that permit forced exchanges on payment of just compensation when private or public necessity so dictates. Epstein then uses these six building blocks to clarify many intractable problems in the modern legal landscape. His discussion of employment contracts explains the hidden virtues of contracts at will and exposes the crippling weaknesses of laws regarding collective bargaining, unjust dismissal, employer discrimination, and comparable worth. And his analysis shows how laws governing liability for products and professional services, corporate transactions, and environmental protection have generated unnecessary social strife and economic dislocation by violating these basic principles.

Simple Rules for a Complex World offers a sophisticated agenda for comprehensive social reform that undoes much of the mischief of the modern regulatory state. At a time when most Americans have come to distrust and fear government at all levels, Epstein shows how a consistent application of economic and political theory allows us to steer a middle path between too much and too little.

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Review: Simple Rules for a Complex World

User Review  - Sam Reaves - Goodreads

When the health care bill runs to nearly two thousand pages, it's time to revisit this 1995 classic. Epstein, a University of Chicago legal scholar, argues against the idea that the complexity of ...

Review: Simple Rules for a Complex World

User Review  - Craig J. - Goodreads

Simple Rules for a Complex World by Richard A. Epstein (1995)

Contents

• Too Many Lawyers Too Much Law: 1
• Cutting through Complexity: 19
• The Simple Rules: 49
• Contracting for Labor: 151
• Employment Discrimination and Comparable Worth: 170
• Professional Liability for Financial Loss: 194
• The Origins of Product Liability Law: 211
• The Contemporary Product Liability Scene: 225
• The Internal Life of the Corporation: 246
• The Corporation and the World: 263
• Environmental Protection and Private Property: 275
• The Challenges to Simple Rules: 307
• Notes: 335
• Index of Statutes: 351
• General Index: 357

About the author

Born in 1943, Richard A. Epstein graduated from Columbia in 1964 with a degree in philosophy. He continued his education at Oxford, earning a B.A. in law in 1966, and from there attended Yale, where he received an LL.B. in 1968. Following graduation Epstein joined the faculty at the University of Southern California, teaching there until 1972. He became a regular member of the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1973, where he was named James Parker Hall Professor in 1982 and Distinguished Service Professor in 1988. Richard Epstein writes extensively concerning the law. His works include Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), Bargaining with the State (1993) and Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Simple Rules for a Complex World
• Author: Richard Allen EPSTEIN
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997
• ISBN: 0674808215, 9780674808218
• Length: 361 pages
• Subjects: Law / Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice; Law / General; Law / Remedies & Damages; Political Science / Law Enforcement; Political Science / Public Policy / General