Law and Behavioral Sciences: Why We Need Less Purity Rather than More

In his inaugural lecture, Peter Mascini takes issue with the goal of scientific purity in the behavioral study of the law, conceived as the deliberate choice to postulate a limited number of universally applicable behavioral principles. The guiding principle of behavioral sociology is that law behaves in correspondence to social space, while the guiding principle of law and economics is that individuals behave rationally.

Peter Mascini defends a two-fold thesis: first, that the purification of sociology proposed by behavioral sociology is a blind alley that can only be exited by allowing impurity. Second, that the behavioral economics movement has offered law and economics an opportunity to reinvigorate by embracing impurity. He continues by arguing that we need even less purity in the behavioral study of the law than is offered by behavioral economics. He proposes a more modest empirical approach that no longer searches for universally applicable predictions and that allots an important role to the meanings actors attribute to their own behavior.