This result was not necessarily wrong, but the Court’s analysis was wrong. The Grutter and Gratz Courts replaced the “minimum necessary preference” requirement with a requirement that admissions programs provide “individualized consideration,” which we show amounts to a “Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask” regime. The Court will not “ask” probing questions about the size and differentiation of preferences as long as the government decisionmaker does not “tell” the Court how much of a racial preference it is giving. Indeed, as an example of the differential standards the Court applied, we demonstrate that while the Court impugned the admissions program at issue Gratz for making race decisive for “virtually every minimally qualified minority applicant,” in fact the fraction of qualified minority applicants for whom race was decisive was smaller in the admissions program struck down in Gratz than it was in the admissions program upheld in Grutter.

We call for a return to the minimum necessary preference requirement. Instead of examining whether preferences are “individualized,” courts should determine whether the constitutionally relevant benefits of granting preferences of a given size outweigh the constitutionally relevant costs, both overall and at the margin.

This paper reanalyzes the clerkship market and the other markets studied by Professor Roth from the standpoint of the costs and benefits of information acquisition. It shows that, far from market failure, the use of time as a currency in the market, represents the working out of market forces where other, more traditional terms of trade - in particular, price - are unavailable. The paper also shows that virtually all of the other markets studied by Roth that show timing peculiarities are characterized by restraints on the use of price to clear the market.

Not coincidentally, in no other area of the law has the conflict between economics and ordinary moral sensibilities been perceived to be so sharp. When we are deciding how to apportion punishment, our instinct is to look backwards: wrongdoers should be condemned in proportion to the reprehensibility of their acts. I'll call the position that punishment should flow directly from these intuitions intrinsic value retributivism. Economics, in contrast, uses the forward-looking idiom of deterrence: punishment is justified if and to the extent that it produces a desired state of affairs; if the optimal degree of punishment so derived is out synch with intuitions about the reprehensibility of a particular crime, so much the worse for those intuitions.

My goal in this essay is to demonstrate that economic analysis lacks the conceptual resources needed to criticize intrinsic value retributivism in this fashion. The economic theory necessarily presupposes some theory of value that tells us what states of affairs we are trying to maximize through punishment. To construct that theory, the members of a community must consult their shared intuitions. Once a theory of value so derived is plugged into deterrence theory, however, the results won't differ in any material respect from the ones the law would produce if informed explicitly by intrinsic value retributivism.

This claim, which I'll call the theory of value dilemma, can be reduced to three sub-claims. The first is that the economic analysis of criminal law depends on an externally specified theory of value; without some account of what state of affairs the law is trying to maximize, the consequentialist logic of deterrence can't get off the ground. Second, this theory of value is essentially political; that is, there's nothing internal to economic approach that justifies discounting the valuations implicit in the decisions of a democratic political community's legal institutions, and hence nothing internal to economics that forecloses political advocacy of any particular theory of value. And the third and final sub-claim is that these politically derived evaluations will, as a practical and conceptual matter, always dominate the distinctive normative components of the economic theory of deterrence. I'll discuss each of these points in turn.

Representative John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) has proposed the "Citizen Legislature and Political Freedom Act" that essentially would repeal all limits on political campaign contributions and merely require immediate disclosure by candidates when they do receive contributions. This type of "pure disclosure" reform has garnered support from a wide spectrum of political activists, from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to Stanford Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan.

But there exists in our polity a counter-image--the voting booth--that stands against the cult of disclosure. Ballot secrecy was adopted toward the end of the nineteenth century to deter political corruption. Voting booth privacy disrupted the economics of vote buying, making it much more difficult for candidates to buy votes because, at the end of the day, they could never know for sure who voted for them.

A similar pro-anonymity argument can be applied to campaign finance. We could harness similar anonymity benefits by creating a "donation booth": a screen that forces donors to funnel campaign contributions through blind trusts that would keep candidates from learning the identity of their supporters. Just as the secret ballot makes it more difficult for candidates to buy votes, mandating anonymous donations through a system of blind trusts might make it harder for candidates to sell access or influence because they would never know which donors had paid the price. Knowledge about whether the other side actually fulfills his or her promise is an important prerequisite for trade. People--including political candidates--are less likely to deal if they are uncertain whether the other side performs.