“Katz wisely peppers his puzzles with humor, jokes, mini-plays, and thoughtful warnings of difficult passages to come (along with welcome invitations to skip ahead) that temper this otherwise demanding volume and make following the twists and turns of the argument well worth the challenge. And for those for whom puzzling is a pleasure in itself, the book will be a feast.”

Jay Wexler | Boston Globe

“Mr. Katz unravels the logical tangles with clarity, humor and a light touch—a testament to the quality of his writing.”

Jonathan V. Last | Wall Street Journal

“Leo Katz is a creative and original thinker across the disciplines of law, economics, and philosophy, and this excellent work should be of interest to anyone in pursuit of new ideas.”

Tyler Cowen, George Mason University

“This is a tour de force of scholarship, demonstrating how disparate and often annoying elements of law have their roots in social choice theory. In most fields the best and most impressive scholarship demonstrates how seemingly independent phenomena have their roots in the same theoretical and empirical sources, and that is exactly what Katz does in Why the Law Is So Perverse. Katz shows that the impossibility of combining divergent views of the social good into a single normative order produces the intellectual tectonic stresses that lead to many of the law’s surface anomalies. For anyone who enjoys thinking deeply about law this book is highly recommended.”

Matthew Spitzer, University of Texas School of Law

“Leo Katz is the master of the difficult question. He draws us in to a puzzle and examines it from many angles until we feel that we understand not just the puzzle, but the world around us. One of the wonders of this excellent book, Why the Law is so Perverse, is that it dares and then trusts the reader to keep three balls in the air at once. It is that third ball that makes this book so perfect.”

Saul Levmore, University of Chicago Law School

“[E]ntertaining [and] enlightening. . . . [Katz’s] conclusions . . . are argued with a good lawyerly wit, verve, and mastery of the material, and the book is written in a style that nonexperts will appreciate. . . . It is rare that his reviewer is willing to call an academic book ‘delightful,’ but this one deserves it. It is just plain fun. Highly recommended.”

 

M. Berheide, Berea College | Choice