Law is a behavioural system. Most law seeks to regulate, incentivize and nudge people to behave in some ways and not in others – it seeks to shape human behaviour. Traditional economic analysis of law is committed to the assumption that people are fully rational, but empirical evidence suggests that people very often exhibit bounded rationality, bounded self-interest, and bounded willpower. This course about behavioural law and economics, with an emphasis on regulation, looks at the implications of actual, not hypothesized, human behaviour for the law. It considers, in particular, how using the mildest forms of interventions, law can steer people’s choices in welfare-promoting directions.
