In the Wrong Place at the Right Time

A Simple Mistake Led to a Career as a Prodigious Scholar in Law and Economics

By
Cathy Madison
An illustration of Francisco Parisi.

Francesco Parisi

Illustration: Nigel Buchanan

Francesco Parisi is known for his soaring intellect, inexhaustible energy, and prodigious academic output. But the Oppenheimer Wolff and Donnelly Professor of Law says a series of paved the way to becoming one of the most widely recognized leaders in his field.

“I am where I am thanks to a series of fortunate accidents,” Parisi told the European Association of Law and Economics when he received its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. “The mere accident of arriving 15 minutes late to the wrong classroom led to an enchantment with the methodology of law and economics,” he said in telling the story of his final year of the University of California, Berkeley’s J.S.D. program.

Due to what he calls his “good Italian” tardiness and a room change, he had landed in a tort theory class instead of a jurisprudence seminar. Too embarrassed to leave and noting algebraic equations on the blackboard, he stayed. “I had never seen mathematics used to understand the functioning and effect of legal rules,” he says. “I always loved mathematics. My mom was a math teacher. My dad was a judge on the Italian Supreme Court. That class was bringing together my two intellectual heritages.”

That unexpected encounter launched a law and economics career that included other head-shakers, such as speaking at a seminar to which he had been invited by mistake and accepting a random invitation to sample beer and trade ideas, which eventually led to four published papers. Both expanded his universe.

Born and raised in Rome, Parisi earned a University of Rome law degree, came to the U.S. as a Fulbright Scholar, and earned legal and economics degrees (L.L.M., J.S.D., and M.A. at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. at George Mason University). He has taught at those schools as well as Louisiana State University and the University of Virginia. He joined the Minnesota Law faculty in 2006 and is also the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna. Parisi is a prolific writer who has published seven books and more than 250 articles in leading journals, and he has served in numerous editorial positions.

His diverse experiences and background are precisely what fuels his research into how laws affect human behavior, which incentives work best in which situations, and how different countries approach similar problems in disparate ways.

“I travel a lot, and I look at comparative law across societies, across history,” he says. “If the rules are different or have changed over time, that’s a good flag.” No one rule is effective all the time, he explains. When one consistently outperforms another, legal systems converge. However, if persistent differences exist, scholars are prompted to investigate the issue.

He cites a recent trip home to Italy when his daughter picked him up from the airport and they discussed car insurance. “You would think the market would be an incentive to offer similar services, but the same industry acts so differently across the ocean,” he says. In Europe, for example, evidence from dashcams can only help the driver legally. But in the U.S., they can be used as evidence against their owner. Hence no one uses them and less evidence is available when an accident occurs.

American and European approaches to breach of contract also differ. Is any breach acceptable as long as damages are paid? Or should an opportunistic breach, motivated by the desire for profit, be treated differently? Parisi studies wide-ranging questions through a mathematical lens: Can reasonable doubt be quantified? Should the law harvest the social value of information generated from research failures? Would holding robot manufacturers liable for non-negligent accidents incentivize them to invest more in safety? Given that the U.S. requires unanimous felony verdicts, could smaller juries better serve justice?

“Research in law and economics has affected and will affect more and more people,” Parisi says. “It provides an analytical foundation predicting how people will react to legal rules. Before a change is implemented, it is important to understand whether individuals will actually behave in the ways lawmakers hope they will.”

“It’s no stretch to say that he’s a genius,” says Daniel Pi ’12, assistant professor of law at the University of New Hampshire, and Parisi’s frequent co-author. Taking Parisi’s class was transformative, he says. “It was like peeking behind the curtain to discover that the law is ultimately a bunch of math. It blew my mind.”

Parisi says the first two weeks of his class are a culture shock for many new students, due to both his Italian accent and his unique way of thinking. “There is no memorizing cases or rules,” he says. “We just think on our feet. We don’t have an answer yet, and we may not by the end of class. It’s like practicing a marathon. We’re not here to win the race but to perfect our form.”

“He’s more open to ideas than anybody I’ve ever known,” says Pi. “When you give him an idea, he unpacks it immediately, seeing how it looks upside down and inside out. He also points out the absurd consequences, much to the amusement of anyone present. My being a law professor today is a direct consequence of Francesco having been mine. I think the world of him.”

Minnesota Law Magazine

Fall 2024
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