Locating Distribution
本文批评Kaplow和Shavell将分配问题仅局限于社会福利函数构建的基础层面，提出分配考量还可在中间层面发挥作用，如作为经验法则或约束条件。
Unlike many practitioners of the economic analysis of law, Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell take distributional issues seriously: that is, they acknowledge that the choice of a social welfare function (SWF) will involve attention to distributive issues. (The suggestion in their book that notions of fairness should receive no independent weight is an artifact of their idiosyncratic definition of “fairness,” which the present paper criticizes.) But although they do take distributional issues seriously, Kaplow and Shavell are too eager to relegate them to the foundational level at which the SWF is constructed. This paper explores the possibility that distributional considerations may play a midlevel role as well. They may play a role as rules of thumb, or they may play a more robust role reflecting their status as constraints on the construction of an acceptable SWF.