This book is the first to apply the tools of game theory and information economics to advance our understanding of how laws work. Organized around the major solution concepts of game theory, it shows how such well known games as the prisoner’s dilemma, the battle of the sexes, beer-quiche, and the Rubinstein bargaining game can illuminate many different kinds of legal problems. Game Theory and the Law highlights the basic mechanisms at work and lays out a natural progression in the sophistication of the game concepts and legal problems considered.

Three questions concerning modern legal thought provide the framework for It’s All in the Game: What should judges do? What do judges do? What can judges do? Contrasting his own answers to traditional responses and moving playfully between debates of high theory, daily practices of appellate judges, and his own enlightening analyses of significant court rulings, Allan C. Hutchinson examines what it means to treat adjudication as an engaged game of rhetorical justification. His resulting argument enables the reader to grasp more fully the practical operation, political determinants, and the transformative possibilities of law and adjudication. Taking on leading contemporary theories to explore the claim that “law is politics,” Hutchinson delineates a route toward professional, relevant, and responsible—if radical—judicial practices. After discussing the difference between foundationalist, antifoundationalist, and nonfoundationalist legal critiques, he offers a focused, unequivocal, and positive account of the advantages of operating within a nonfoundationalist framework. Although such an approach centralizes the role of rhetoric in law, Hutchinson claims that this does not necessitate a turn away from politics or, more particularly, from a progressive politics. Driving home the political and jurisprudential impact of his critique and of his account of nonfoundationalist alternatives, he urges judges and jurists to engage in law’s language game of politics. This engaging book will interest linguistic philosophers, legal theorists, law students, attorneys, judges, and jurists of all stripes.

Why do some people not hesitate to call the police to quiet a barking dog in the middle of the night, while others accept the pain and losses associated with defective products, unsuccesful surgery, and discrimination? Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey collected accounts of the law from more than four hundred people of diverse backgrounds in order to explore the different ways that people use and experience it. Their fascinating and original study identifies three common narratives of law that are captured in the stories people tell. One narrative is based on an idea of the law as magisterial and remote. Another views the law as a game with rules that can be manipulated to one's advantage. A third narrative describes the law as an arbitrary power that is actively resisted. Drawing on these extensive case studies, Ewick and Silbey present individual experiences interwoven with an analysis that charts a coherent and compelling theory of legality. A groundbreaking study of law and narrative, The Common Place of Law depicts the institution as it is lived: strange and familiar, imperfect and ordinary, and at the center of daily life.