In Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life, I argue that the future depends on configuration. Putting together resources and cooperation in the right combinations is essential to human flourishing in multiple domains: the environment, the city, the workplace, the market, and the home. It is also central to reaching collective and … Continue reading Go Configure by Lee Anne Fennell
Month: March 2020
Introduction Slices and Lumps, the remarkable new book by Professor Lee Fennell, begins from the title itself to tell a story about the instability of how the world is organized. Lumps can be natural things, formed in a bowl by humidity’s kiss, but slices are often the work of human intervention. When, then, should we … Continue reading Paying with Lumps by Brian Galle
Slices and Lumps is a recipe book for thinking. Using a deceptively simple analytical framework, the book showcases the power of conceptualizing the world through the prism of “slices” and “lumps.” As Professor Fennell shows, the level of granularity of legal rights and duties—how lumpy they are—can have a marked impact on behavior, which presents … Continue reading Slicing Defamation by Contract by Yonathan Arbel
Lumpiness and the Standard Picture Economists often employ a convenient set of assumptions regarding the goods that individuals care about and the form of individuals’ preferences for these goods. For short, call this set of assumptions “the Standard Picture.” (1) Individuals’ preferences are “outcome-oriented,” in the sense that each individual cares about her own holdings of … Continue reading The Smooth Value of Lumpy Goods by Matthew D. Adler
Mom and Dad are aging. They have more house than they need, and at their ages maintaining it has become an unmanageable burden. Their friends have begun to die off, they are close to giving up their driver’s licenses, and the kid has long since grown up and moved away. The sensible thing to do … Continue reading Co-Location Covenants by Lior Jacob Strahilevitz
The framework of aggregation and division that Lee Fennell develops in Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life is both elegant and encompassing. Through the simple device of questioning how ideas and individuals are grouped together, or split apart, Fennell is able to explain and challenge concepts from diverse areas of law. … Continue reading Lumps in Antitrust Law by Sean P. Sullivan
Lee Fennell’s Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life reveals the benefits of isolating configurations in legal analysis. A key characteristic of configurations, or “lumps” whether found or created, is that they are indivisible. To say a lump is indivisible is not to say that it is literally impossible to divide, but … Continue reading Indivisibilities in Technology Regulation by Lauren Henry Scholz
Introduction As Lee Anne Fennell writes in Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life, “law must determine the proper unit of analysis—how widely or narrowly to set its viewfinder—in assessing whether a given line has been crossed or a given standard has been satisfied . . . . Second, law must decide how sharp or … Continue reading From Slices to Lumps and Back Again: Aggregation and Division in US Federal Income Tax Law by Sarah B. Lawsky
Introduction: Lumpy Depth Spend too long within the pages of Lee Fennell’s Slices and Lumps and you begin to see slices and lumps everywhere. The deadline for this Essay fast approaches and I fear I will not have enough time to devote to it. Sure, there are slices of time I can carve out between … Continue reading Slicing (and Transferring) Development by John Infranca
I. Lumping & Splitting vs Pooling & Separating My goal in this short Essay is to show how an analytic vocabulary first developed to analyze insurance markets by Michael Rothschild and Joseph Stiglitz (some parallel ideas were developed by Michael Spence at roughly the same time) can shed light on a range of institutional design … Continue reading Getting People to Lump or Split Themselves: Pooling vs Separation by Peter Siegelman