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Tel: 215.746.3457
Fax: 215.573.2025
Office Room: Silverman 136
Email: twilkins@law.upenn.edu
Expertise
- Contracts
- Behavioral Economics
- Social Science and the Law
Bio
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan studies the role of moral judgment in legal decision-making.
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Tess Wilkinson-Ryan studies the role of moral judgment in legal decision-making. She uses experimental methods from psychology and behavioral economics to ask how people draw on their moral intuitions to motivate or inform legal choices. Her research focuses in particular on private contracts and negotiations. She argues that many people think of their contracts as promises, and, in turn, they take the moral rules of promising into account when they decide whether to perform or breach. She has used experimental research to support the contention that apparently neutral terms like liquidated damages clauses or assignment of contract rights can have significant effects on parties’ behavior. The broad goal of her scholarship is to use behavioral research to shed light on how people interpret the law, how they conceive of their rights and obligations, and how social and moral norms interact with the applicable legal rules.
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Representative Professional Positions
Penn Law – Assistant Professor of Law (2010- ); George Sharswood Fellow in Law and Psychology, Lecturer in Law (2008-10)
University of Pennsylvania College of Arts & Sciences – Graduate Fellow, Teaching Assistant (2005-08)
Bernstein, Shur, Sawyer & Nelson, Portland, Maine – Summer Associate (2004)
Education Law Center, Philadelphia – Summer Intern (2003)
Representative Publications
Psychology of Contract Precautions, 80 U. CHI. L. REV. ___ (with David Hoffman) (forthcoming)
Legal Promise and Psychological Contract, 47 WAKE FOREST L. REV. ___ (forthcoming)
Transferring Trust: Reciprocity Norms and Assignment of Contract, J. EMPIRICAL LEG. STUD. __ (2012) (forthcoming)
Breaching the Mortgage Contract: The Behavioral Economics of Strategic Default, 64 VAND. L. REV. 1547 (2011).
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Do Liquidated Damages Encourage Efficient Breach? A Psychological Experiment, 108 MICH. L. REV. 633 (2010).
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Breach is for Suckers, 63 VAND. L. REV. 1003 (2010) (with David Hoffman).
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Fault in Contracts, A Psychological Approach, in FAULT IN AMERICAN CONTRACT LAW (Omri Ben-Shahar & Ariel Porat eds., Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Moral Judgment and Moral Heuristics in Breach of Contract, 6 J. EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUD. 405 (2009) (with Jonathan Baron).
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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 & INEQ. 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).
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For additional publications, please consult
Current & Recent Research
Current Working Papers
Fee Salience in Retirement Investment Choices (with Jill Fisch). (forthcoming)
The Sucker Norm: Betrayal, Humiliation, and Retaliation in Economic Behavior. (forthcoming)
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