Law and economics

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Economics

Law and economics or economic analysis of law is the application of economic theory (specifically microeconomic theory) to the analysis of law that began mostly with scholars from the Chicago school of economics. Economic concepts are used to explain the effects of laws, to assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and to predict which legal rules will be promulgated.[1]

Relationship to other disciplines and approaches[edit]

As used by lawyers and legal scholars, the phrase "law and economics" refers to the application of microeconomic analysis to legal problems. Because of the overlap between legal systems and political systems, some of the issues in law and economics are also raised in political economy, constitutional economics and political science.

Approaches to the same issues from Marxist and critical theory/Frankfurt School perspectives usually do not identify themselves as "law and economics". For example, research by members of the critical legal studies movement and the sociology of law considers many of the same fundamental issues as does work labeled "law and economics," though from a vastly different perspective.

The one wing that represents a non-neoclassical approach to "law and economics" is the Continental (mainly German) tradition that sees the concept starting out of the governance and public policy (Staatswissenschaften) approach and the German Historical school of economics; this view is represented in the Elgar Companion to Law and Economics (2nd ed. 2005) and—though not exclusively—in the European Journal of Law and Economics. Here, consciously non-neoclassical approaches to economics are used for the analysis of legal (and administrative/governance) problems.

Origin and history[edit]

As early as in the 18th century, Adam Smith discussed the economic effects of mercantilist legislation. However, to apply economics to analyze the law regulating nonmarket activities is relatively new. A European law & economics movement around 1900 did not have any lasting influence.[2] In 1961, Ronald Coase and Guido Calabresi independently from each other published two groundbreaking articles: "The Problem of Social Cost"[3] and "Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts".[4] This can be seen as the starting point for the modern school of law and economics.[5]

Harold Luhnow, the head of the Volker Fund, not only financed F. A. Hayek in the U.S. starting in 1946, but he shortly thereafter financed Aaron Director's coming to the University of Chicago in order to set up there a new center for scholars in law and economics. The University was headed by Robert Maynard Hutchins, a close collaborator of Luhnow's in setting up this "Chicago School". The University already had Frank Knight, George Stigler, Henry Simons, and Ronald Coase—a strong base of libertarian scholars. Soon, it would also have not just Hayek himself, but Director’s brother-in-law and Stigler's friend Milton Friedman, and also Robert Fogel, Robert Lucas, Eugene Fama, Richard Posner, and Gary Becker.

The historians Robert van Horn and Philip Mirowski described these developments, in their "The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics" chapter in The Road from Mont Pelerin (2009); and historian Bruce Caldwell (a great admirer of von Hayek) filled in more details of the account in his chapter, "The Chicago School, Hayek, and Neoliberalism", in Building Chicago Economics (2011). Van Horn (a Hayek critic) filled in yet more details of this history in a Seattle University Law Review article ("Chicago's Shifting Attitude Toward Concentrations of Business Power [1934–1962]") explaining how the influence of Luhnow and other corporate funders wrenched the Chicago School away from its predecessors' common support for anti-trust. Van Horn argues that the opposition to antitrust, and the acceptance of corporate monopoly power and control by oligopolies (such as Germany's and Italy's fascists had always supported), which came to be championed by Robert Bork and others at Chicago, had their actual origins in America's corporate boardrooms.

In 1958, Director founded the Journal of Law & Economics, which he co-edited with Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and which helped to unite the fields of law and economics with far-reaching influence.[6] In 1962, he helped to found the Committee on a Free Society. Director's appointment to the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1946 began a half-century of intellectual productivity, although his reluctance about publishing left few writings behind. He taught antitrust courses at the law school with Edward Levi, who eventually would serve as Dean of Chicago's Law School, President of the University of Chicago, and as U.S. Attorney General in the Ford administration. After retiring from the University of Chicago School of Law in 1965, Director relocated to California and took a position at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He died September 11, 2004, at his home in Los Altos Hills, California, ten days before his 103rd birthday.

In the early 1970s, Henry Manne (a former student of Coase) set out to build a center for law and economics at a major law school. He began at Rochester, worked at Miami, but was soon made unwelcome, moved to Emory, and ended up at George Mason. The last soon became a center for the education of judges—many long out of law school and never exposed to numbers and economics. Manne also attracted the support of the John M. Olin Foundation, whose support accelerated the movement. Today, Olin centers (or programs) for Law and Economics exist at many universities.

Positive and normative law and economics[edit]

Economic analysis of law is usually divided into two subfields: positive and normative.

Positive law and economics[edit]

'Positive law and economics' uses economic analysis to predict the effects of various legal rules. So, for example, a positive economic analysis of tort law would predict the effects of a strict liability rule as opposed to the effects of a negligence rule. Positive law and economics has also at times purported to explain the development of legal rules, for example the common law of torts, in terms of their economic efficiency.

Normative law and economics[edit]

Normative law and economics goes one step further and makes policy recommendations based on the economic consequences of various policies. The key concept for normative economic analysis is efficiency, in particular, allocative efficiency.

A common concept of efficiency used by law and economics scholars is Pareto efficiency. A legal rule is Pareto efficient if it could not be changed so as to make one person better off without making another person worse off. A weaker conception of efficiency is Kaldor-Hicks efficiency. A legal rule is Kaldor-Hicks efficient if it could be made Pareto efficient by some parties compensating others as to offset their loss.

Important scholars[edit]

Important figures include the Nobel Prize–winning economists Ronald Coase and Gary Becker, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit judges Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner, Andrei Shleifer and other distinguished scholars such as Robert Cooter, Hans-Bernd Schäfer, Henry Manne, William Landes, and A. Mitchell Polinsky. Guido Calabresi, judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, wrote in depth on this subject; his book The Costs of Accidents: A Legal and Economic Analysis (1970) has been cited as influential in its extensive treatment of the proper incentives and compensation required in accident situations.[7] Calabresi took a different approach in Ideals, Beliefs, Attitudes, and the Law (1985), where he argued, "who is the cheapest avoider of a cost, depends on the valuations put on acts, activities and beliefs by the whole of our law and not on some objective or scientific notion" (69).

Influence[edit]

The economic analysis of law has been influential in the United States as well as elsewhere. Judicial opinions use economic analysis and the theories of law and economics with some regularity, in the US but also, increasingly, in Commonwealth countries and in Europe. The influence of law and economics has also been felt in legal education, with graduate programs in the subject being offered in a number of countries. The influence of law and economics in civil law countries may be gauged from the availability of textbooks of law and economics, in English as well as in other European languages (Schäfer and Ott 2004; Mackaay 2013).

Many law schools in North America, Europe, and Asia have faculty members with a graduate degree in economics. In addition, many professional economists now study and write on the relationship between economics and legal doctrines. Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, has written that "the intellectual movement that has had the greatest influence on American academic law in the past quarter-century [of the 20th Century]" is law and economics.[8]

Criticisms[edit]

Despite its influence, the law and economics movement has been criticized from a number of directions. This is especially true of normative law and economics. Because most law and economics scholarship operates within a neoclassical framework, fundamental criticisms of neoclassical economics have been drawn from other, competing frameworks, though there are numerous internal critiques as well.[9] Yet other schools of economic thought have emerged and have been applied to the work of law and economics in, for example, the work of Edgardo Buscaglia and Robert Cooter on "Law and Economics of Development".[10]

Rational choice theory[edit]

Critics of the law and economics movements have argued that normative economic analysis does not capture the importance of human rights and concerns for distributive justice. Some of the heaviest criticisms of the "classical" law and economics come from the critical legal studies movement, in particular Duncan Kennedy[11] and Mark Kelman.

Pareto efficiency[edit]

Relatedly, additional critique has been directed toward the assumed benefits of law and policy designed to increase allocative efficiency when such assumptions are modeled on "first-best" (Pareto optimal) general-equilibrium conditions. Under the theory of the second best, for example, if the fulfillment of a subset of optimal conditions cannot be met under any circumstances, it is incorrect to conclude that the fulfillment of any subset of optimal conditions will necessarily result in an increase in allocative efficiency.[12]

Consequently, any expression of public policy whose purported purpose is an unambiguous increase in allocative efficiency (for example, consolidation of research and development costs through increased mergers and acquisitions resulting from a systematic relaxation of anti-trust laws) is, according to critics, fundamentally incorrect, as there is no general reason to conclude that an increase in allocative efficiency is more likely than a decrease.

Essentially, the "first-best" neoclassical analysis fails to properly account for various kinds of general-equilibrium feedback relationships that result from intrinsic Pareto imperfections.[12]

Another critique comes from the fact that there is no unique optimal result. Warren Samuels in his 2007 book, The Legal-Economic Nexus, argues, "efficiency in the Pareto sense cannot dispositively be applied to the definition and assignment of rights themselves, because efficiency requires an antecedent determination of the rights (23–4)".

Responses[edit]

Law and economics has adapted to some of these criticisms (see "contemporary developments", below). One critic, Jon D. Hanson of Harvard Law School, argues that our legal, economic, political, and social systems are unduly influenced by an individualistic model that assumes "dispositionism"—the idea that outcomes are the result of our "dispositions" (economists would say "preferences"). Instead, Hanson argues, we should look to the "situation", both inside of us (including cognitive biases) and outside of us (family, community, social norms, and other environmental factors) that have a much larger impact on our actions than mere "choice". Hanson has written many law review articles on the subject.[13]

Contemporary developments[edit]

Law and economics has developed in a variety of directions. One important trend has been the application of game theory to legal problems.[14] Other developments have been the incorporation of behavioral economics into economic analysis of law,[15] and the increasing use of statistical and econometrics techniques.[16] Within the legal academy, the term socio-economics has been applied to economic approaches that are self-consciously broader than the neoclassical tradition.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ David Friedman (1987). "law and economics," The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 3, p. 144.
  2. ^ Kristoffel Grechenig & Martin Gelter, The Transatlantic Divergence in Legal Thought: American Law and Economics vs. German Doctrinalism, Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 2008, vol. 31, p. 295–360; Martin Gelter & Kristoffel Grechenig, History of Law and Economics, forthcoming in Encyclopedia on Law & Economics.
  3. ^ Coase, Ronald (1960). "The Problem of Social Cost" (PDF). The Journal of Law and Economics. 3 (1): 1–44. doi:10.1086/466560. This issue was actually published in 1961.
  4. ^ Calabresi, Guido (1961). "Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts". Yale Law Journal. 70 (4): 499–553. doi:10.2307/794261. JSTOR 794261.
  5. ^ Posner, Richard (1983). The Economics of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-674-23525-0.
  6. ^ Kristoffel Grechenig & Martin Gelter, The Transatlantic Divergence in Legal Thought: American Law and Economics vs. German Doctrinalism, Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 2008, vol. 31, p. 295–360
  7. ^ Litan, Robert (1988). Liability: Perspectives and Policy. Brookings Institution Press. ISBN 978-0-8157-5271-4.
  8. ^ Anthony T. Kronman, The Lost Lawyer 166 (1993).
  9. ^ Schlag, Pierre (2013-09-17). "Coase Minus the Coase Theorem – Some Problems with Chicago Transaction Cost Analysis". Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. SSRN 2320068.
  10. ^ The law and economics of development - Catalog - UW-Madison Libraries. search.library.wisc.edu. JAI Press. 1997.
  11. ^ "Essays on Law and Economics". www.duncankennedy.net.
  12. ^ a b Markovits, Richard (1998). Second-Best Theory and Law & Economics: An Introduction. 73. Chicago-Kent Law Review.
  13. ^ Hanson, Jon D.; Yosifon, David G. (17 October 2006). "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture" – via papers.ssrn.com.
  14. ^ Baird, Douglas G.; Gertner, Robert H.; Picker, Randal C. (1998). Game Theory and the Law. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674341111.
  15. ^ Jolls, Christine; Sunstein, Cass R.; Thaler, Richard (1997–1998). "A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics". Stanford Law Review. 50: 1471.
  16. ^ Martin Gelter & Kristoffel Grechenig, History of Law and Economics, forthcoming in Encyclopedia on Law & Economics.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

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