Negative Reciprocity and Law‪.‬

INTRODUCTION Economic analysis has provided the most influential means of understanding legal doctrines since the legal realist movement of the early twentieth century. In the past fifteen years, however, findings from behavioral economics have refined or refuted aspects of the law-and-economics paradigm. The rational actor model, which generates behavioral predictions for law-and-economics analyses, has been undermined by studies revealing widespread bounded rationality, bounded will-power, and bounded self-interest. (1) Behavioral evidence like this yields positive implications for how laws affect human behavior, and, relatedly, whether legal doctrines and "regular people" are pursuing the same ends. These positive predictions might have normative consequences. If, for example, the ends of the legal system differ from the goals of individuals in society, then perhaps the ends of the legal system merit reconsideration.