Most legal academics and policy makers believe that notions of fairness should be accorded positive weight in evaluating legal policies. We explain, however, that ascribing importance to any notion of fairness (other than one concerned solely with the distribution of income) will sometimes lead...

The traditional view of economists has been that corrective taxes are superior to direct regulation of harmful externalities when the state's information about control costs is incomplete. In recent years, however, many economists seem to have adopted a different view--that either corrective...