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Tel: 215.746.3457
Fax: 215.573.2025
Office Room: Tanenbaum 333
Email: twilkins@law.upenn.edu
Expertise
- Contracts
- Family Law
- Law and Social Sciences
Bio
Tess-Wilkinson-Ryan joins Penn Law as a George Sharswood Fellow for the upcoming academic year. The Sharswood Fellowships, generously supported by the Penn Law Review, are awarded to scholars who plan to enter legal academia. Each year Penn Law awards two fellowships that each fund two years of research, writing, and teaching.
Wilkinson-Ryan studies the role of moral intuitions in legal decision-making. Most people care deeply about fairness and justice, and the goal of her current research is to describe how this affects their judgments in legal contexts. Individuals often ignore, misunderstand, or even consciously flout laws that violate social or moral norms. One of the failures of traditional law and economics analyses is the lack of an account for the role of informal norms in real-life negotiations. Wilkinson-Ryan uses experimental paradigms from psychology and behavioral economics to investigate the role of moral norms in legal decision-making. She wrote her dissertation on the role of moral judgment in contract law. She argues that people are uncomfortable with the prospect of breaking a promise, and resistant to profiting from what they perceive to be a moral violation. Therefore, even when the law of contract permits money damages, efficient breach may be deterred by moral norms. Wilkinson-Ryan is also interested in the role of moral norms in family law, particularly for issues like divorce bargaining and custody agreements.
Representative Publications
Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Efficient Breach? A Psychological Experiment, Mich. L. Rev. (forthcoming) (accepted for Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, May 2009)
Breach is for Suckers, 63 Vanderbilt Law Review __ (forthcoming 2010) (with David Hoffman)
Moral Judgment and Moral Heuristics in Breach of Contract, J. EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUD. (forthcoming) (with Jonathan Baron).
The Effect of Conflicting Moral and Legal Rules on Bargaining Behavior: The Case of Divorce, 37 J. LEGAL STUD. 315 (2008) (with Jonathan Baron).
Negotiating Divorce: Gender and the Behavioral Economics of Divorce Bargaining, 26 LAW & INEQUALITY 109 (2008) (with Deborah Small).
Comment, Admitting Mental Health Evidence to Impeach the Credibility of a Sexual Assault Complainant, 153 U. PA. L. REV. 1373 (2005).
Identity Disturbance in Borderline Personality Disorder: An Empirical Investigation, 157 AM. J. PSYCHIATRY 528 (2000).
For additional publications, please consult
Current & Recent Research
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