The Legal Analyst
There are two kinds of knowledge law school teaches: legal rules on the one hand, and tools for thinking about legal problems on the other. Although the tools are far more interesting and useful than the rules, they tend to be neglected in favor of other aspects of the curriculum. In The Legal Analyst, Ward Farnsworth brings together in one place all of the most powerful of those tools for thinking about law.From classic ideas in game theory such as the "Prisoner’s Dilemma" and the "Stag Hunt" to psychological principles such as hindsight bias and framing effects, from ideas in jurisprudence such as the slippery slope to more than two dozen other such principles, Farnsworth’s guide leads readers through the fascinating world of legal thought. Each chapter introduces a single tool and shows how it can be used to solve different types of problems. The explanations are written in clear, lively language and illustrated with a wide range of examples.The Legal Analyst is an indispensable user’s manual for law students, experienced practitioners seeking a one-stop guide to legal principles, or anyone else with an interest in the law.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2011–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 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/
- Sure. I like Hello, Startup by Brikman and Zero to One by Thiel and follow Y Combinator's content on YouTube. I also love Disciplined Entrepreneurship - the book used in MIT's Entrepreneurship 101, 102 & 103 courses. There's a corresponding workbook, too. A lot of this stuff is subjective, though. That's the stuff that has proven useful to me, personally, but as always, ymmv! Anything on basic business & economics is probably enough for a smart person with a good head on her shoulders to get going & pick up the rest on the move.
Overall, the number one most valuable skill in my opinion, and the one that I keep coming back to over the years is critical thinking. For that, I love Understanding Arguments, the Philosopher's Toolkit & Ethics Toolkit by Baggini & Fosl, and anything "legal", which sharpens your critical thinking, like Farnsworth's Legal Analyst or even Intro to American Law on Coursera. But those three books on basic reasoning will serve you well for the rest of your life as a business and technical leader.
- 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.
- > what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point.
Large and fascinating topic I'm researching, very relevant for agentic AI and ML too. One way that groups can fail is that they just don't work to dampen / vote out individual errors properly (see PAC learning, Condorcet). Other kinds of errors only occur in groups, and can occur even when constituents individually aren't actually wrong. Some related stuff is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet's_jury_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade
The last is probably the most relevant here and made worse by the negative effects of hierarchy. To quote one section:
> The negative effects of informational cascades sometimes become a legal concern and laws have been enacted to neutralize them. Ward Farnsworth, a law professor, analyzed the legal aspects of informational cascades and gave several examples in his book The Legal Analyst: in many military courts, the officers voting to decide a case vote in reverse rank order (the officer of the lowest rank votes first), and he suggested it may be done so the lower-ranked officers would not be tempted by the cascade to vote with the more senior officers, who are believed to have more accurate judgement;
For token-maxxing, our "senior officers" are just executives, and line workers aren't going to vote. Who is the senior officer for those senior officers? It's not shareholders! It's really the executives of even bigger companies, because that is the actually applicable promotion ladder. It's all kind of obvious, but also a genuinely better explanation than "monkey see monkey do". These are just the simpler things, and there's more gnarly dilemmas in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)
