This is one that I was expecting to happen. To meet one of those legends of the field of Law and Economics that were so trendy some time ago back in Peru. I remember that for every session of my class in the undergrad in Law and Economics with Alfredo Bullard we had one reading of Mitchell Polinsky. To be fair, I did not enjoy those ones that much because they were usually based on given numbers in order to explain the concepts. I was always doubtful whether the findings would depend on the specific numbers chosen or the findings could really be generalized. Of course I didn’t mention this to him when we talked at the end of the lecture. Anyhow, today that I saw an event with Polinsky as guest lecturer, no matter how jetlagged I was for the flight back to Boston, I thought I totally had to go. He was doing an analysis of how convenient prison would be in comparison to parole for deterring criminal conducts. The method was to assign levels of disutility to the time that a person would spend in prison or on parole, but the analysis included the changes in the level of disutility according to the time when prison or parole would occur, bringing the units of disutility to present values with certain discount rates. A simply beautiful mixing of legal and economic concepts. The only question that keeps bothering me is if the academics that do this kind of analysis are aware that their results are only one of the inputs that policy makers should use, since the economic model is intrinsically based in strong simplifications of reality.