Chris Guthrie

Who they are

According to Vanderbilt University's 2009 announcement of his appointment, Guthrie became dean of Vanderbilt Law School on 1 July 2009, after seven years on its faculty and a spell as associate dean for academic affairs. The same announcement lists his areas of expertise as conflict resolution, negotiation, judicial decision making and behavioural law and economics.

His education was at Stanford University, where he took his first degree in 1989, then a master's in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a law degree at Stanford Law School. He practised with Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, California, and joined the University of Missouri law faculty in 1996. He also taught as a visiting professor at Northwestern University Law School and at Washington University School of Law. He is a co-author of a textbook on resolving legal conflicts, and the announcement credits him with more than 40 scholarly articles in leading law reviews and with several prizes for scholarly research.

Key papers

Guthrie, C. (2003). 'Prospect Theory, Risk Preference, and the Law.' Northwestern University Law Review, 97, 1115 onwards. Read at abstract level. The article argues that legal scholars need a model of human decision making to predict how people respond to legal rules, and that behavioural law and economics has drawn on prospect theory instead of rational choice theory. It concentrates on the finding that people tend to avoid risk when facing gains and seek it when facing losses, reviews legal scholarship that applies the idea across several areas of doctrine, and notes limits including external validity and differences between individual and group decisions. It concludes that prospect theory is a valuable tool for legal scholars and policy makers.

Guthrie, C. (2000). 'Framing Frivolous Litigation: A Psychological Theory.' University of Chicago Law Review, 67, 163-216. Listed in the reference notes of Thinking, Fast and Slow against the passage on plaintiffs with weak claims.

Key ideas

The idea attached to Guthrie on this site is the legal reading of the fourfold pattern. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman credits him with applying the pattern to civil suits: a plaintiff with a likely win is in the risk-averse cell and may accept a settlement below the claim's expected value, while a defendant who is likely to lose is in the risk-seeking cell and may refuse a good offer and gamble. On the same logic, a long-shot claim gives a defendant a reason to pay to make the risk go away.

The book says experiments with law students and practising judges bore out the prediction about defendants. A separate experiment on simulated litigants by Gilliland and Dunn (2008) found that framing and perceived chance of winning predicted settlement, and that legal role alone did not.

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