The Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Economics and the Law by Eyal Zamir and Doron Teichman (eds) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 824 pp., € 143,39; Hardback

The field of behavioural science has enjoyed a remarkable period of growth in recent years, not only inacademiabut inbroaderpublic appeal.DanielKahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Richard Thaler andCass Sunstein’sNudge are perhaps themostwellknown examples of the discipline, earning the authors the status of celebrity sauvant reserved for only the best and brightest from university’s normally secluded ivory towers. Economic analysis of law is of somewhat older pedigree, associated first with the University of Chicago Law School of the late 1970s and 80s, and now so well-entrenched in the lexicon of the legal academy that its central premise – costs and benefits to society should be taken into account when crafting legal rules – seems self-evident to the point that it is scarcely possible to imagine a time when it did not hold sway in courts, legislatures or law schools. Enter behavioural economics and the law (a simpler phrase has not yet been created which adequately encompasses the subject) – a cross disciplinary melding of two often contradictory paradigms which has both expanded upon and detracted from its antecedents. Behavioural economics as a species of legal reasoning instructs us to observe that while it remains useful to weigh the costs and benefits of legal principles, we must not assume that such costs and benefits are assessed as rationally as classical homo economicus would wish us. Instead, the 21st century’s thinker is decidedly irrational, meaning that he/she takes decisions that do not necessarily maximize their own utility or conserve costs because other influences are at play. We now know that we are ruled by our own biases and heuristics, a whole litany of which have been identified and categorized via extensive experiments with human subjects which surprisingly disclose our altruistic, hunch-filled, myopic and vain quirkiness. Since we do not make decisions rationally after all, so the argument goes, the laws which govern social interactions must be designed to accommodate thesebiases and in somecases,work to counter them for our own best interests and for society at large. This is law and economics for a new age – an age in which humanity has fallen from the pedestal of its enlightened Scientific Revolution lucidity. It turns out that we were never that rational or logical, and, what’s worse the deluge of information available to us on the internet has not helped focus our minds on the relevant or meaningful but has instead given us a platform upon which to indulge further in our own approval-seeking, insecurity-ridden foibles. At the forefront of this shift in how we understand human thought and action, Behavioral Economics and the Law is a compendium of 29 short articles by the leading authors in the nascent field of behavioural economics as applied to law, ranging from well-crafted general explanations of the phenomenon of heuristics and biases which comprise the discipline as a challenge to the rational man orthodoxy, to more detailed expositions on particular biases such as loss aversion and overoptimism, culminating inapplicationsof these concepts todistinct areas of the law such as contract, taxation and plea bargaining. Without exception, the chapters are well-written and exhaustively researched, if somewhat heavy on cross citation among the small community of scholars. The discussion of the flaws of human reasoning by reference to our deeper psycho-