Currently, the dominant enforcement paradigm is based on the idea that states deal with ‘bad people’ – or those pursuing their own self-interests – with laws that exact a price for misbehavior through sanctions and punishment. At the same time, by contrast, behavioral ethics posits that ‘good people’ are guided by cognitive processes and biases that enable them to bend the laws within the confines of their conscience. Yuval Feldman analyzes these paradigms and provides a theoretical and empirical comparison of traditional and nontraditional enforcement mechanisms to advance our understanding of how states can better deal with misdeeds committed by normative citizens blinded by cognitive biases regarding their own ethicality. By bridging the gap between new findings of behavioral ethics and traditional methods used to modify behavior, Feldman proposes a ‘law of good people’.
Yuval Feldman is the Kaplan Professor of Legal Research at Bar-Ilan University Law School Israel. He was a fellow in the Edmond J. Safra Institutional Corruption Lab at Harvard Law School where he studied both the experimental and theoretical implications of behavioral ethics for the legal theory. Since 2014, he has been a senior Fellow at the Israeli Democracy Institute where he co-heads a multi-disciplinary team that runs lab and field experiments as well as policy analysis. Feldman’s teaching and collaborative.
