The Law of Good People
Challenging States' Ability to Regulate Human Behavior

This book argues that overcoming people's inability to recognize their own wrongdoing is the most important but regrettably neglected area of the behavioral approach to law.

Yuval Feldman (Author)

9781316502082, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 May 2019

256 pages, 7 b/w illus. 1 table
23 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.45 kg

'The Law of Good People provides a comprehensive summary of an important body of research on Behavioral Ethics … will serve as a useful resource for legal scholars, lawyers, policymakers, and social scientists interested in law and legal institutions.' Janice Nadler, Michigan Law Review

Currently, the dominant enforcement paradigm is based on the idea that states deal with 'bad people' - or those pursuing their own self-interests - with laws that exact a price for misbehavior through sanctions and punishment. At the same time, by contrast, behavioral ethics posits that 'good people' are guided by cognitive processes and biases that enable them to bend the laws within the confines of their conscience. In this illuminating book, Yuval Feldman analyzes these paradigms and provides a broad theoretical and empirical comparison of traditional and non-traditional enforcement mechanisms to advance our understanding of how states can better deal with misdeeds committed by normative citizens blinded by cognitive biases regarding their own ethicality. By bridging the gap between new findings of behavioral ethics and traditional methods used to modify behavior, Feldman proposes a 'law of good people' that should be read by scholars and policymakers around the world.

1. Introduction
2. Behavioral ethics and the meaning of good people for legal enforcement
3. Revisiting traditional enforcement interventions
4. Revisiting non-formal enforcement interventions
5. The role of social norms in legal compliance and enforcement
6. Are all people equally good?
7. Pluralistic account of the law: the multiple effects of law on behavior
8. Enforcement dilemmas and behavioral trade-offs
9. The corruption of 'good people'
10. Discrimination by 'good' employers
11. Summary and conclusion.

Subject Areas: Constitutional & administrative law [LND], Public international law [LBB], Legal ethics & professional conduct [LATC], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ]