Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy

This conference has been cancelled. 

Conference to be held on Friday-Saturday October 31/November 1, 2025. This conference is organized by the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy (CLEPP).

Welfarism is a family of moral views that see morality as oriented around the production of good outcomes—with the goodness of outcomes, in turn, understood in terms of well-being. Utilitarianism—ranking outcomes according to the sum total of well-being—is the most prominent species of welfarism. But there are other possibilities. For example, both welfare-egalitarians and prioritarians care about the distribution of welfare and not just its total amount.

A generation ago, in their book Fairness versus Welfare (2006), the prominent law-and-economists Louis Kaplow and Steve Shavell argued for orienting legal theory around welfarism. It seems clear that their call-to-arms did not succeed. Welfarism has never been significant in constitutional theory, at least in the U.S., and that has not changed over the last decades. Indeed, with the rise of originalism and historicism as dominant modes of interpretive argument in constitutional case law and scholarship, considerations of well-being seem even less visible than in the past. As for private law, the moral commitments of much “New Private Law” scholarship seem to be non-welfarist. And while law-and-economists continue to write about both private law and public law, much of this work now is explanatory (seeking to identify causal factors) rather than evaluative.

This conference aims to increase interest in welfarist legal theory. We invite papers that adopt a welfarist perspective (be it utilitarianism or some variant of non-utilitarian welfarism) in evaluating some aspect of the legal system—be it a legal doctrine, an interpretive method, the structure of some legal institution, the content of statutes or regulations, etc. Discussion of either U.S. or non-U.S. law is welcome. We also invite papers that engage methodological issues for welfarists, or that discuss the differences between welfarism and non-welfarism with respect to law. 

Topics might include:

• Incorporating welfarism into constitutional or statutory interpretation
• Welfarist critiques of particular legal fields or doctrines, whether public or private law
• The role of welfare in “Law & Political Economy” analysis
• Topics in jurisprudence viewed through a welfarist lens

Conference organizers:  Matthew Adler, adler@law.duke.edu; Christopher Buccafusco, buccafusco@law.duke.edu.