Another thing that law and economics is critical at studying is the idea of unintended consequences that the law might create or facilitate through decision making. What I mean by this is that if you do not understand the full extent of how you, how a legal rule is likely to change or alter an individual's behavior, then you may in fact think you're doing something good, and it turns out you're actually working contrary to your own goals. Let me give you the example of a step stool. If someone comes in in a tort action and claims that a step stool is in fact defective, it has a product defect, and it is a defect because it wasn't constructed strong enough. It, it needed to have a higher level of steel or titanium or whatever else so that it could sustain the weight of a very large person.and so this very large person falls off the step stool because it collapses underneath them and sues the step stool company. The stepstool company will claim that they were making the stepstool for a number of different individuals and that they had warnings and other things. But if a judge decides that actually this is a product defect, all stepstools need to be built to a higher level of quality and with a higher level of steel. This is going to add costs. The judge may think that they are doing a good thing by finding the product effective and giving relief to the injured party. But if they don't consider the economics of it, they don't understand the possible unintended consequences. What are some of the unintended consequences in this example? One is that stepstool prices will go up. And that's going to happen because the price of the material is necessary to reach the new standard that the judge has applied. Mind you, this is not the standard that consumers have demanded, because the standard that consumers have demanded would have been reflected in the products actually supplied, because the consumers would send signals to the market of what they're willing to pay for a product. And at this point, in this market, that signal has not been sent for stronger stepstools. So a judge who applies this new rule that every stepstool must be built to hold a certain level of weight, it increases the price of stepstools. When you increase the price of stepstools, you price some people out of the market. Those people are going to do a variety of things. One is that they still need to change lightbulbs, so they still need a stepstool of some kind or some way to get to a higher level. So one way to do this is to buy stepstools on the secondary market. Which, the secondary market, the used market, we have no idea what kind of quality they're getting there. And so you may, in fact, not be driving people to go buy the stronger stepstools, but instead to the weaker stepstools that people have donated because they don't work very well. Additionally, some people might get up on one of those big swivel chairs, those office swivel chairs, the kind you see at the curb oftentimes thrown out because they have such a short lifespan. But you get up on that swivel chair and try and change the light bulb, and that's even less sturdy than the stepstool itself. And so instead of creating a market for different quality or different level of stepstools, the judge has effectuated an unintended consequence of actually increasing the number of accidents, because more people are going to use alternatives which are less safe as a result of the increase in the price of the stepstools. So these are the kinds of stories that law and economics can explain to policy makers, to judges, and others to try to avoid those kinds of unintended consequences.