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I want to start off with what I consider to be the statement of the problem. As I understand it, you're concerned that the time horizons for maximizing the value of an investment vary among individuals in surprisingly wide, imperfectly predictable, and often seemingly irrational ways. And, if I understand your target here, the idea is that a deeper understanding of the causes of this variation might aid in the planning and design of legal and corporate policies. To jump into this, I'm going to give a little bit of an introduction about behavioral biases, and something that I've called "time-shifted rationality." I'll then back up to provide some basic context about where behavior comes from, from a brain science perspective, and then talk about two key things. First: Why does the brain discount time? Second: How does the brain discount time? I'll then spend a few minutes, toward the end, talking about prospects for interdisciplinary consilience, in furtherance of a more accurate and robust model of time discounting.

This review essay discusses the book A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer (MIT Press, 2000). The essay builds on work previously appearing in Owen D. Jones, Sex, Culture, and the Biology of Rape: Toward Explanation and Prevention, 87 Cal. L. Rev. 827 (1999) and Owen D. Jones, Law and the Biology of Rape: Reflections on Transitions, 11 Hastings Women's Law Journal 151 (2000).

For all that has been written about rape, its multiple causes remain insufficiently understood for law to deter it effectively. This follows, in part, from inadequately interdisciplinary study of rape causation. This Article argues that integrating life science and social science perspectives on sexual aggression can improve law's model of rape behavior, and further our efforts to reduce its incidence. The Article first explains biobehavioral theories of sexual aggression, and offers a guide to common but avoidable errors in assessing them. It then compares a number of those theories' predictions with existing data and demonstrates how knowledge of the effects of evolutionary processes on human behavioral predispositions may help us better understand - without justifying or excusing - psychological mechanisms that contribute to patterns of rape. Because increased knowledge of causal influences may afford law increased effectiveness in deterring rape, the author then explores ways in which bio-behavioral theories could affect analysis of several current legal issues, from the debate over chemical castration to the meaning of motive in rape-relevant legislation.

As first year law students unhappily discover, the meaning of "law" is frustratingly protean, shifting by usage and user. Depending on whom you ask, law is a system of rules, a body of precedents, a legislative enactment, a collection of norms, a process by which social goals are pursued, or some dynamic mixture of these. Law's principal purpose is to define and protect individual rights, to ensure public order, to resolve disputes, to redistribute wealth, to dispense justice, to prevent or compensate for injury, to optimize economic efficiency, or perhaps to do something else. And yet one thing is irreducibly clear: at its most basic, every legal system exists to effect some change in human behavior. That is, law is a lever for moving human behavior. The very obviousness of this proposition obscures its significance. The principal implication is this: law depends on a behavioral model as a lever depends on a fulcrum. Only a behavioral model, which purports to explain why people behave as they do, can suggest that if law moves this way behavior will move that way. This means that the success of every legal system necessarily depends, in part, on the solidity-that is, the accuracy and predictive power-of the behavioral model on which it rests.