It is not often that a legal scholar begins a book by making their tribe superfluous. “Too many lawyers, too much law,” and so begins, Epstein’s Simple Rules for a Complex World. (1995, p.1) [hereinafter Simple Rules]. Having called out the problem of excess, Epstein sets out “to develop a set of simple rules capable of handling the most complex of social relations imaginable, whether in the United States or anywhere else.” (1995, p.21) The book argues that most legal relationships can be reduced to questions of individual autonomy, property acquisition, contract, tort, eminent domain, and taxation. For each of the six themes, Epstein details “a set of universal prescriptions whose intrinsic desirability is not tightly bound to the controversies of the day.” (1995, p.22). This special issue of the European Journal of Law and Economics revisits and extends the themes in Simple Rules. The papers in this issue are the outcome of a conference at the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University, School of Law in 2020, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the book’s publication. Over two days, lawyers, economists, and scholars working in law and economics, examined the book, its continuing relevance and possible extensions to new areas of law and economics, and offered new criticisms and extended it to other countries. Those discussions are brought together in the nine papers that are part of this special issue. In law and economics, there is a large body of literature analyzing the “optimality” of specific rules in different fields of law. Epstein however argues that aiming for optimality, with individual rules for each situation, might lead to an overly complex system overall. In Simple Rules, Epstein argues that the complexities imposed by the American regulatory system create private costs of compliance, public costs of enforcement and social costs related to uncertainty which, in aggregate, are likely

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简单规则对复杂世界的重要性特刊简介

法律学者通常不会通过使他们的部落变得多余来开始一本书。“太多的律师，太多的法律”，爱泼斯坦的《复杂世界的简单规则》就这样开始了。(1995, p.1) [以下简称简单规则]。爱泼斯坦指出了过度的问题，并着手“制定一套简单的规则，能够处理可以想象的最复杂的社会关系，无论是在美国还是在其他任何地方。” (1995, p.21) 该书认为，大多数法律关系可以归结为个人自治、财产获取、合同、侵权、征用权和税收等问题。对于六个主题中的每一个，爱泼斯坦都详细说明了“一套普遍的处方，其内在的可取性与当时的争议没有紧密联系。” （1995 年，第 22 页）。本期《欧洲法律与经济学杂志》特刊重新审视并扩展了简单规则中的主题。本期论文是纽约大学法学院古典自由学院 2020 年为庆祝该书出版 25 周年而举行的一次会议的成果。在两天的时间里，律师、经济学家和从事法律和经济学工作的学者审查了这本书、它的持续相关性以及对法律和经济学新领域的可能扩展，并提出了新的批评并将其扩展到其他国家。这些讨论汇集在本期特刊的九篇论文中。在法律和经济学领域，有大量文献分析不同法律领域特定规则的“最优性”。然而，爱泼斯坦认为，以最优为目标，对于每种情况都有单独的规则，可能会导致整个系统过于复杂。在《简单规则》中，爱泼斯坦认为，美国监管体系施加的复杂性造成了合规的私人成本、执法的公共成本以及与不确定性相关的社会成本，总的来说，这些成本很可能