TOTM
Economic Calculation in the Public Defender’s Office
Truth on the Market
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After spending a few years away from ICLE and directly engaging in the day to day grind of indigent criminal defense as a public defender, I now have a new appreciation for the ways economic tools can explain behavior that I had not before studied. For instance, I think the law and economics tradition, specifically the insights of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek on the importance of price signals, can explain one of the major problems for public defenders and their clients: without price signals, there is no rational way to determine the best way to spend one’s time.