Simple Rules for a Complex World.

Richard A. Epstein Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138. 361 pp., $35.

Reviewed by Charles W. Chesbro

If your interest in the law solely involves personal capital accumulation, you may not be interested in Simple Rules for a Complex World., by University of Chicago law school professor Richard Epstein. However, if you have even a passing interest in the reasons we have laws to begin with and how we might improve jurisprudence in general, you will find this book a very interesting read.

This is not to say that you will agree with all the author's conclusions. Any book whose introduction is entitled "Too Many Lawyers, Too Much Law" should invite debate, given the current push for "tort reform." But you will probably find yourself agreeing with many of the author's premises.

Epstein's views and theories about the law are logically and simply presented. At the risk of summarizing his "simple rules" too briefly, they are:

1. Autonomy. You own yourself.

2. Property. People own things.

3. Contract. There is enhanced value to society from voluntary exchanges of goods and services. For example, let's say I have a violin I can't play, and you've got a truck you don't use. You can play, and I can haul things. We trade. Society is improved by the resulting music and work.

4. Tort. Society benefits by protection from aggression, which interferes with basic ownership and with voluntary exchanges.

5. Necessity. The basic rules may be suspended when there is imminent peril to life or property.

6. Just compensation. Coordination of various competing issues results in just compensation, including damages payments and equitable relief.

Epstein discusses other specific rules and policies, but these six are the building blocks of his theories. More complicated issues, such as monopoly, antitrust, eminent domain, and harm to relational interests, both in contract and in tort, are all addressed with reference to the basic rules.

Parts I and II should probably be taught in law school orientation, as they give the reader a framework of the law. Part III, "The Rules in Action," sets out to apply the rules, including one basic theme--that any law that increases the complexity of the legal system (and what law doesn't?) is only justified if it improves the overall efficiency of the system. This purely economic view of the law is either simple or simplistic, depending on your point of view, and it ignores other factors, such as moral or social incentives, that take part in creating law.

Part III includes chapters on labor contracts, antidiscrimination law, professional negligence, products liability, corporations, and environmental protection. Each is an ambitious application of the basic theme. For example, as an advocate of a pure "employment at will" system, Epstein proposes that employers and employees should contract with each other in ways that will automatically benefit both without any government intervention.

Although this theory may work when both parties have the same expertise and sophistication, this is rarely the case. The theory assumes that a migrant farm worker is as free to bargain for salary and benefits as is a skilled professional. The conclusion must then be that migrant farm workers voluntarily bargain them selves into poverty.

Epstein apparently has a dim view of unions. But this bias is clear. For example, he calls the highest possible wages that can be negotiated through collective bargaining "monopoly" wages (when the union has a monopoly position), but he calls the lowest possible wages "competitive" (when the employer has the monopoly position). These are not the adjectives one would expect to find in a neutral analysis.

Because Epstein's analysis of the law is purely economic, it leaves little or no room for morality or social incentives as a basis for law. He dismisses these as mere interference.

Any treatise of merit should invite criticism and inspire the reader to think, and this book does. In fact, Epstein acts as his own critic by including a final chapter on "The Challenges to Simple Rules," where he answers his own questions.

The best way I can describe what it is like to read this book is to compare doing so to a courtroom experience most of us have had. You are listening intently to your opposition's direct exam, but each time you jot down a question to ask during cross-examination, your opponent asks the question and receives an answer that helps his or her case. Repeatedly, you take your pen and cross through the questions you have added to your cross-exam notes. Irritation at being consistently deprived of what you thought were great questions mixes with admiration of your opponent's skill. So it is with reading this book.

Although not without flaw, Simple Rules for a Complex World is a clear, consistent, libertarian economic approach to the law that should keep you interested from start to finish. Expect the book to end up high on Newt Gingrich's next "must read" list of books, if it isn't there already.