Tomer Stein (The University of Alabama School of Law) has posted Epistemology at the Marketplace on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
People acquire knowledge from others, but the epistemic impact of the laws governing marketplace transactions is not directly studied. This Article groups together contract, agency, partnership, and corporate law as voluntary exchange law in order to assess its impact on our ability to acquire knowledge qua justified true beliefs (plus) from others. The Article concludes that the right to recover contractual liabilities increases people’s ability to acquire knowledge, but so do rules that impose limited liability and legal personhood on non-human entities. For exchanges outside the open markets and within units of organization, this Article concludes that, under certain conditions, fiduciary arrangements provide epistemic advantages even when any individual fact statement given by a fiduciary is epistemically inferior as compared to the same statement given contractually and considered alone.
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