Christine Jolls

Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor of Law and Organization. Jolls, with Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, launched the field of behavioral law and economics. She has also contributed equally important work operationalizing the insights of behavioral economics for public policy. Her article with Sunstein on debiasing introduced the idea that law can be used to reduce cognitive decisional problems (bounded rationality). Related articles elaborated the debiasing approach, examining how unconscious discrimination poses a particular challenge to antidiscrimination law, and how and when debiasing provides a solution. Jolls has also made foundational contributions to employment law in her work on accommodation mandates. She has provided a new understanding of the operation of the mandate provisions in the federal disability discrimination law, countering the conventional economic wisdom that mandates have the perverse effect of disadvantaging the group the legislature intended to benefit.