The Chronicles of a Capitalist Lawyer

I have received several comments for my previous post, and I thank all of the commentators for the effort. I must say though, if only I set a prize for giving these comments, I would definitely give such prize to my brother, Prasetya Dwicahya, for his excellent comments (no family bias involved here). So if you have not read his comments, you better check it out before going further with this post. Anyway, most of what I will say has already been covered by Prasetya's comments. Thus, I'll focus instead in analyzing his proposed policy to find out whether such policy can be the best option to be pursued by the government. Prasetya's proposed policy is something that we call as the freedom of choice policy which is in line with the concept of free market and pareto efficiency (a condition where as a result of the policy, some individuals are made "better off" without making any individual to be "worse off"). People is free to choose whether they want to

Suppose one day a major automobile publicly listed company announces that it is selling a new cheap product that will allow people to have car more easily (for the sake of discussion, we will not discuss the externalities that people will face with more cars in the road).  The car is a huge success for the company, generating a huge profit, and the stocks' value of the company has also increased several times in a year. But then, an accident happens, a gruesome one. Further independent investigation shows that while the probability of the accident is very low, around 1:100,000 per year, it can be avoided if only the company install a safety device.    Facing this result, the company announces to the public that to cut the costs of the car, it did not install the safety device required for preventing such accident. Why? Apparently, the cost for installing the safety device is around US$10 per car and since they produce 2,500,000 car a year, the total additional costs that the comp

All first year law students in any part of the world should know this principle: ignorantia legis neminem excusat or simply saying, you will not be able to defense your illegal act in front of the court on the basis that you don't know the law. This might be a simple principle, but there is a deep meaning here and I had a very nice discussion with Prof. Anup Malani this morning regarding this matter. Try to consider this. Suppose you're attending a class of a "killer" professor. Most of the time, he only mumblings aimlessly. Then, on the final examination day, you suddenly realize that the questions presented do not contain a single thing that has been taught in the class. It's completely different and you stare blankly at the exam paper. What do you feel? That it isn't fair? That it seems like the professor is cheating the student? Well if you think so, I would completely agree. This is not fair at all. In fact, if I were you, I will definitely report the

It's been a while since the controversial discussion on whether mini skirts induce men to rape women. Various debates have occurred but I would say that most of the times they miss the important points. You see, criminals are human being and to some extent they will calculate the costs and benefits of doing their criminal activities. It does not even have to be a sophisticated analysis, it can be in the form of a quick analysis that anyone can do by himself. Let us use corruption as an example. The benefit? A huge amount of money to be used by yourself and maybe your family. The costs? Going to prison and/or losing your corruption assets. Then do a simple calculation on the probability of you getting caught by the authority and how severe the punishment will be. If you think that the probability of enforcement is low and that you can buy your freedom later on, then the benefits of corruption outweigh the costs. The result? People will have strong incentives to corrupt. The same

Imagine that you are a voter in a general election for the newest legislative members. Suppose that you dedicate your own time to know each particular candidates in order to vote as an informed voter. You further realize that individually, your voting will be pretty much insignificant, you can't and will never know whether your voting will be a decisive one in case there are a lot of voters (let us just say that in the context of Indonesia, there are around 60 million voters). Calculating all the costs for doing your personal research and doing the act of vote itself plus your understanding of how insignificant your vote is, would you still call yourself as a rational being if in the end, you still vote? (To shed some light, the typical definition of rationality used in this discussion is the definition used by economist, rational person means a person who act for his own best interest) This is the basic premise of the Voting Paradox's concept, at least the first part of it

I can still clearly remember how I learn the law during my days at the University of Indonesia. I seldom took any notes, usually I preferred to copy my friends' notes which were available for a cheap price at our beloved copy center, Barel. Most of the time, I sat at the back of the class since I'd already known that I can found most, if not all, of what the lecturers said in the learning materials provided by them in the copy center. And lastly, I usually learned for my exams during the trip from my home to the faculty (which took around 2 hours). As I said in my previous post, life is pretty simple and easy in the faculty of law. I even once declared my faculty as the most relaxed faculty in the South East Asia (that's during my trip for an international student meeting in Korea in 2004 and it is based on comparison with what other students doing in South East Asia, Japan, China and Korea). I must say though that the above system is not entirely bad. Since the students

You can read the post here . Enjoy.

I've spent the last three weeks collecting law journal articles for my personal research and I was very surprised when I realized that I had obtained around 900 articles from only 20 or so US law professors. I note that Richard Posner and Cass Sunstein are probably the most productive ones. Posner himself has written more than 290 articles for law journals (that's what I've gotten from Hein-Online) and I know that he also write countless books and opinions as a federal judge. So yes, saying that he is a prolific writer would be an understatement. My first reaction to this fact is making a comparison with Indonesian law professors. Honestly, it is very rare to find Indonesian law professors who actively write their thoughts in Indonesian law journals or books. Heck, it is even harder to find law journals which can survive their first publication. To the best of my knowledge, most professors spend their times writing newspapers op-ed or acting as expert witnesses. It's

As previously mentioned in my post , I've been doing a research on the validity of slavery under Islamic Law as a part of establishing a general theory of Islamic Law. While I have collected many new books and law journal articles on this issue, trying to find empirical evidence of how classical Islamic legal scholars took it, I've just realized that I missed one of my important sources that has stayed with me for years, Bidayatul Mujtahid, a superb comparative fiqh book written by Ibn Rusyd, a prolific and famous Islamic legal scholar (though most western people know him as a philosopher rather than a jurist). The book is considered as a masterpiece and is still used in various Shari'a faculties around the world as teaching materials, even though it was written around 800 years ago (or around 600 years after the birth of Islam). So a couple of days ago, I read again the Indonesian and English versions of Bidayatul Mujtahid and I found out in the Jinayat (penal offenses)