HOW LAW IMPACTS BEHAVIOR

Lawrence M. Friedman, Impact: How Law Affects Behavior (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016) ("This small book, as the title suggests, is about impact: about how law affects behavior. . . The sheer volume of work [in impact studies] is a problem, a barrier. . . I thought I saw a real value in treating the subject synthetically. Value in trying to simplify. Value in setting our an outline, a structure, the bones and the skelton, leaving our (as one would have to) the muscles, nerves, and glands. Value in trying to show some sort of order underneath the chaos, some sort of harmony in all the conflicting voices and noises. Value in trying to provides a series of hooks to hang all the scholarship on. Value in trying to classify and to suggest some menacingly categories, The result o, n the pages that flow, is my modest attempt to do those various things." Id. at ix.  From the book jacket: "Law and regulations are ubiquitous, touching on many aspects of individual and corporate behavior. But under what conditions are laws and rules actually effective? A huge amount of recent work in political science, sociology, economics, criminology, law, and psychology, among other disciplines, deals with this question. [NOTE: Perhaps that suggests that one cannot really know the law-as-a-discipline well unless one has a fair grasp of those other disciplines. Food for thought.] But these fields rarely inform one another, leaving the state of research disjointed and disorganized. Lawrence M. Friedman finds order in this cacophony. Impact gathers recent finding into one overarching analysis and lays the groundwork for a cohesive body of work in what Friedman labels, 'impact studies'." "The first important factor that has a bearing on impact is communication. A rule or law has no effect if it never reaches its intended audience. The public's fund of legal knowledge, the clarity of the law, and the presence of information brokers all influence the flow of information from lawmakers to citizens. After a law is communicated, subjects sometimes comply, sometimes resist, and sometimes adjust or evade. Three clusters of motives help shape which reaction will prevail: first, rewards and punishments; second, peer group influences; and third, issues of conscience, legitimacy, and morality. When all of these factors move in the same direction, law can have a powerful impact; when they conflict, the outcome is sometimes unpredictable.").