Book Recommendation: The Law of Good People

Hot off the press, Yuval Feldman's new book The Law of Good People: Challenging State's Ability to Regulate Human Behavior (Cambridge Press) landed on my desk. This is a must-read for anyone who is interested in behavioral law and economics, regulation, and compliance.

I am not objective: Yuval is my frequent co-author on a series of experimental and theoretical articles on incentives, decentralized enforcement, designing reporting systems, and law and psychology. But no need to only take my word for it: Yuval is an extremely prolific and original leader in the field and I join the praise of the book with others including Cass Sunstein who writes "A fascinating comprehensive exploration of the complexities of human motivation and of how to get good people to do really good things. Opens up new vistas in behavioral science and also in public policy." Robert Cooter says Yuval "provides a fresh perspective...his creativity and knowledge o law, economics and psychology will make readers rethink the incentive effects of laws and current theories of law and economics." Henry Smith calls the book "pioneering" and writes "This book is the first to introduce the large and heterogeneous body of work on behavioral ethics to the world of law and legal policy" and Jeff Rachlinsky calls it "exciting". This should definitely get on your summer reading list! Also a must-have for every law library. It was released this week and is the #1 release on Amazon in the business law category.

More about the book from the publisher:

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.