HN Books @HNBooksMonth

The Legal Analyst by Ward Farnsworth is an enjoyable introduction. https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Analyst-Toolkit-Thinking-about/...

The Law Student's Toolkit class on Coursera from Yale's Ian Ayers covers some similar ground. https://www.coursera.org/learn/law-student/

Look, I appreciate your sincerity but think you are really starting to eat your own tail here. The standard way of resolving the problems you describe is in fact to assume that rights are bundles of actionable interests and to compare the interests at stake in a conflict - such as the right of a private property owner to exercise control over a park vs the right of park visitors to express themselves. That comparison is often carried out using economic methods, where possible; obviously it's hard to quantify the utility of free speech to citizens, but many other kinds of rights can be quantified (and the disutility of restricting speech may be quantifiable if the the overall utility of allowing it is not).

Allow me to suggest this book, which is a great introduction to law and economics without being too technical in either subject: http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Analyst-Toolkit-Thinking-about/d... or if it is not to your taste, this one is good too: http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Order-What-Economics-Matters/dp/0... At the very least, check out Arrow's theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem which explains why ideal procedural outcomes are not possible.

⬐ mindslight

> Look, I appreciate your sincerity but think you are really starting to eat your own tail here

Care to elaborate why? I'm not arguing because I think you're going to suddenly acquiesce, but because I'm trying to refine my own viewpoint.

I obviously can't quickly read the linked books to see what they're actually saying, but they clearly have their own set of philosophies. This is fine, but these philosophies are not beyond reproach.

And as to Arrow's theorem and the problems of procedural outcomes - that's precisely my point! You're the one coming from the viewpoint where we're all bound to an ever-growing system that possesses the mandate to regulate whatever is economically prudent. If a system is incapable of adequately taking into account the conflicting desires of its inhabitants, it should be decentralized so that everybody doesn't have to agree!

⬐ anigbrowl

Basically, because you're assuming that you can identify universal rights and a procedure for reliably identifying them, which you think is going to free you from the implementation problems of axiomatic statements of rights. This is the legal equivalent to squaring the circle, and it has been argued that legal rules are likely as limited by Godel's theorem as any other formal system. Indeed, recognition of such procedural shortcomings is a big reason for the elevated role of the judiciary in common-law legal systems.

system that possesses the mandate to regulate whatever is economically prudent

I don't agree that it's necessarily ever expanding, but insofar as it involves regulating whatever is economically prudent then sure, because I'm a utilitarian. Of course, I only have limited foresight, so I support the democratic approach as a necessary evil although I'd rather a pure technocracy. As long as it produces a reasonable approximation of Pareto optimality, I'm OK with that. It's imperfect, of course, but at least it's a methodology.

[...] it should be decentralized so that everybody doesn't have to agree!

But it already is; living in the US gives you a choice between over 50 different legal systems, and that's only at the state level. Some of them provide exceedingly poor outcomes for their citizens IMHO, but there you go.