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American Law and Economics Review Advance Access originally published online on April 2, 2008
American Law and Economics Review 2008 10(1):1-60; doi:10.1093/aler/ahn002
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Law and Economics Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Economics of the Bill of Rights

Hugo M. Mialon and Paul H. Rubin

Emory University

Send correspondence to, Hugo M. Mialon: Department of Economics, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322-2240, USA; E-mail: hmialon{at}emory.edu.

JEL Classification: K00, K10, K40, H00, H10, H11


  Abstract

We elucidate, connect, and synthesize the literature that employs economics to study the individual rights and freedoms protected by the constitutional amendments comprising the Bill of Rights, especially as they relate to crime. Economics is uniquely suited to studying decisions involving tradeoffs, and each of the amendments requires tradeoffs. Emphasizing these tradeoffs allows us to discuss the constitutional rights in terms of "more or less," as opposed to taking an absolutist approach. We find that the economic literature on the amendments of the Bill of Rights is vibrant and growing, and that viewing the amendments within the framework of economics is highly useful.

We are extremely grateful to an anonymous referee, Steven Shavell, Richard Posner, Tim Brennan, Eugene Kontorovich, Sue Mialon, Eric Rasmusen, Mario Rizzo, Paul Zimmerman, and seminar participants at New York University for detailed comments and helpful discussions. While we examine a large portion of the relevant literature, we do not claim to provide a complete literature survey, and we apologize to anyone whose research may have been omitted.


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