When Laws Seem Fair

Description

Family law rules decide whether former intimate partners have continuing financial obligations to one another, how their property should be divided, and how parental responsibility should be allocated. All may agree such laws should be fair, but how is fairness judged? The authors measured a previously unstudied benchmark of fairness: what seems fair to ordinary people. They asked random samples of community members for their judgment of the fair resolution of hundreds of hypothetical cases and found that rules inductively derived from their patterns of decisions did a better job than did legislatures and judges in balancing the valid but competing fairness claims such cases present. Their work should interest anyone who wants to understand when laws seem fair.