The SPP Blog sat down with MPA Second Year, Lorena Cruz-Serrano to chat about her transition from law to public policy. We discussed Lorena’s professional background, her views on the links and tensions between legal and economic thinking and future ambitions.

What were you doing before the MPA?

Prior to the MPA, I was a transactional lawyer working in toll-road infrastructure project financing in Colombia. Unlike litigators, transactional lawyers work at the pre-contractual phase of the deal. They support clients during the negotiation of a deal, drafting contracts and shepherding through the execution of a business relationship. During the course of these transactions I had the opportunity to advise international and local banks, as well as private firms that acted as concessionaires during negotiations, and to participate in the execution of loan structures to pay for the construction of roads.

The Colombian Government has developed a standard public-private-partnership contract upon which many priority roads are currently being built. In my job, I would analyze and interpret the concession agreement to see if the risks in the loan structure were allocated in line with the risk allocation matrix. Because of the specialized nature of the work, I was able to leverage my experience across a wide range of different projects, first as in-house lawyer in a large financial corporation, then in a law firm.

What made you decide to come to London to do the LSE MPA?

During the course of my work, I worked with people from a wide range of professional backgrounds: civil engineers, industrial engineers, economists, bankers and business administrators. During negotiations I realised that I was often required to consider types of reasoning that weren’t legal – I was being presented with economic, financial and political frameworks that were less familiar to me. Working in such a multi-disciplinary environment encouraged me to see the value in developing a more multi-disciplinary skillset. I wanted to understand how people from different backgrounds analysed information and mounted arguments, and also to develop a shared language to communicate my ideas in a way that they could understand.

This leads nicely to my next question: what do you think are the overlaps between legal and policy thinking?

I think that law has been a very useful background for the MPA. I think of law as this foundational framework on which public policy can be conceived. Laws are this set of basic rules for a game, and public policies can be thought of as different strategies through which you can play the game. Lawyers are trained to think both inductively and deductively – you need both of these to understand economic theory and to conduct quantitative analysis, so I actually think lawyers and economists share a very similar type of rationality.

Another similarity is in the use of evidence. Lawyers focus on building robust evidence to support an argument, and although they use different types of evidence, they use the same strategy. You need to understand the context of what is happening in a given situation and use it to frame your argument – it’s the same with data anlaysis analysis.

Have there been any policy issues or approaches that you’ve found yourself completely changing your mind on?

I think my understanding of the world is different now – I haven’t necessarily changed what I think about particular issues, but I now have another lens to understand how other people make choices and see the world.  As a lawyer, you have an idea of what things should be, and how they should work based on a pre-existing set of rules. But economic and political reasoning takes you beyond the rules, to make you confront not just how things should be done, but what they actually look like in reality, and how they could look in the future. Legal arguments are inclined towards what’s fair and what’s right, while economic arguments are about efficiency and empirics.

What’s one thing you wish economists and public policy practitioners could learn from lawyers?

Law is a presentation of society’s identity, culture, beliefs, and values. It’s a tool society uses to express and enforce agreed aspirations, and what it considers to be morally right and fair. In our careers as policy-makers or economists, we will stumble across the fact that sometimes the most efficient alternative or the most beneficial outcome is not always aligned with the set of rules what we’ve agreed on as a nation. Law shouldn’t be seen as an obstacle to efficient policy-making but as another way to understand the causes and rules around social phenomena.

This is a very interesting point: how can we think about legal rights alongside models that maximize economic utility?

I think we have to consider that as human beings we’re not just maximizing our economic utility – our utility also consists of our preferences and expectations about our rights and liberties. Rights are not just an exogenous variable to control for, but an integral part of our utility function. The implications of this might be that, as policy-makers, we can’t always approach policy choices in terms of a utility/welfare tradeoff; sometimes policy choices involve non-tradeable rights that can’t be reduced to utility-maximizing calculations. Upholding rights is not always efficient, but that doesn’t make it less of an imperative!

What’s next for you?

In the short term, I’d like to work in an environment where I can sharpen and build on my new economic knowledge and put into practice the skills that I’ve acquired. Over the long-term, I’d probably like to move into regional deavelopment and institution-building back home in Colombia. Ideally I’d like to be in a position to mix my legal and economic backgrounds, and to work in policy contexts where I can balance protecting and ensuring rights while also promoting sustainable economic development. I like the idea of working in an environment where I can translate economic reasoning into legal language and reconcile legal and economic modes of thinking.

Authors:

Madeline Goldie is the co-editor of the School of Public Policy blog and current MPA second year
Lorena Cruz Serrano is a current MPA second year