Circumvention of Law and the Hidden Logic Behind It

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2023

Abstract

The law is full of circumvention maneuvers that lawyers try to exploit and authorities try to suppress. We prove formal results showing that all reasonable legal systems are necessarily extremely manipulable by open schemes that require no type of misrepresentation and no violation of the law. In addition, antievasion rules designed to reduce such manipulation can have only limited success and cannot be easily justified as constituting an improvement.

Keywords

circumvention of law, lawyers, legal systems, anti-evasion rules, loophole exploitation, evasion, law-makers, legal circumvention, manipulation, resequencing, legal route, manipulation theorem, equivalence proposition, choice functions, utility functions, rationalizable by a preference

Publication Title

Journal of Legal Studies

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1086/721638

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