The Law and Economics Center at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia School of law is hosting a Research Roundtable on Capitalism and the Rule of Law this week in Destin, Florida. My co-author, Professor Jeremy Kidd (Drake University School of Law) and I are honored to present a draft of our current work-in-progress, “Market Failure and Censorship in the Marketplace of Ideas,” at tomorrow’s (March 5, 2022) session. We look forward to receiving feedback from all the brilliant scholars in attendance. Here’s an abstract of the current draft. We look forward to sharing a link to the full draft soon:

As one author notes, the familiar metaphor of the exchange of ideas as a “marketplace” has “permeate[d] the Supreme Court’s first amendment jurisprudence.” If the test for efficiency in the marketplace for goods is wealth maximization, the test for efficiency in the marketplace of ideas has historically been understood in terms of its ability to reliably arrive at truth, or at least the most socially beneficial ideas within the grasp of a community of discourse. And consistent with economic free-market advocates, the received expectation in Western liberal democracies has been that “a process of robust debate, if uninhibited by…