Applying Richard Posner's economic formula to laws and protest slogans
About the author Privacy policies, terms, and conditions American economist Richard Posner's economic formula on free speech can be highly useful in determining whether laws are good, which, from an economic perspective, means economically efficient. It was inspired by Judge Learned Hand's simpler formula, which compares the harms of the expression (L), discounted by probability (P), to the costs of suppressing it (V, which is equivalent to the social values of the expression). Posner improved Judge Learned Hand's formula by adding "legal error costs" (E) to the costs of suppressing the expression, given that it can be challenging to distinguish harmful expressions that need to be suppressed and good ones that are not meant to be suppressed. In addition, given that the foreseeable harms may not happen immediately and may instead take place over a long period, the harms, measured in dollar terms, need to be discounted to the...