The Art of Law & Macroeconomics (original) (raw)

Considering Law and Macroeconomics

Law & Economics eJournal, 2020

The worst financial and economic crisis to hit the world’s richest economies since the Great Depression inspired a flood of scholarship that straddled the disciplines of law and macroeconomics. With few exceptions, this crisis scholarship did not set out to build a new interdisciplinary movement and did not claim the legacy of earlier efforts to mine the intersection of law and macroeconomics. What are we to make of this moment ten years on? Could Law and Macroeconomics (#LawMacro for short) be an important new turn in legal and economic thought, a casual interdisciplinary tryst on the margins of a hundred-year flood, or, paraphrasing one commentator, this generation’s Freudian pushback against the venerable Law and Economics movement? This symposium issue of Law and Contemporary Problems offers a sampling of views from a September 2019 conference at Georgetown Law on the prospects for LawMacro as a field of inquiry. Our principal goal for the Conference and this Issue has been to c...

Macroeconomic Analysis of Law versus Law and Macroeconomics

PSN: Other Regulation (Topic), 2020

Efforts to conjoin the disciplines of law and macroeconomics raise two main challenges. The first is choosing the specific macroeconomic framework that is to be employed, since there are conflicting possibilities. This is an exercise in economic analysis of law because the difficulty lies in the realm of economics proper. I clarify the problem by examining literature that explores different macroeconomic viewpoints toward the law. The second challenge is reconciling government rule-breaking — a common practice in times of economic turmoil — with deference to the rule of law, which should be everlasting. This is an effort in law and economics, since the focus lies on the interplay between economics and law. I respond by developing the “elasticity” paradigm in law and macroeconomics, a compromise between ex ante concerns with improving the rules of the game and the recognition that the preservation of certain games may depend upon their occasional subversion.

1. The case for Law and Economics: beyond disciplinary Nirvanas?

The Law and Economics movement has reached in recent years a widespread diffusion 1. As Mercuro and Medema (1997) have pointed out," Law and Economics has developed from a small and rather esoteric branch within economics and law to a substantial movement that has helped to both redefine the study of law and expose economics to the important implications of the legal environment" 2. While the standard Law and Economics approach refers typically to legal rules 3, recent developments have been concerned with a more ...

Exploring the interaction between law and economics: the limits of formalism

Legal Studies, 1998

As lawyers concerned with the regulation of economic activity, we applaud the recognition in Professor Charles Goodhart's recent Chorley lecture that much of the ‘law and economics’ of the past quarter-century has involved ‘too much one-way traffic’. If the field of law and economics has indeed largely, as Professor Goodhart suggests, consisted of a process of intellectual imperialism, specifically of the colonisation of law by economics, we consider it important to reflect on the reasons for this, and to make some suggestions to improve the collaboration between the two disciplines. In brief, we suggest that this interaction has been bedevilled by its tendency to reproduce the worst aspects of formalism in each discipline.Professor Goodhart shows that the bulk of law and economics has consisted of a fairly unthinking application of standard neo-classical economic assumptions to legal phenomena which have themselves typically been conceived in conventional doctrinal terms.

Law and Economics: Contexts and Criticisms

The purpose of this paper is trying to reach a brief understanding and overview of the law and economics methodology through exploring its history and origin, and how it was developed. Also this paper will highlight the sub fields of the law and economic methodology and how it operates. finally, it will present the criticisms of that methodology and the counter responses to such criticisms.

Law and Economics in the Legal Academy, Or, What I Should Have Said to Discipulus

University of Toronto Law Journal, 2010

Is there a future for law and economics scholarship within the legal academy that does not involve formal modelling? To reach a positive answer to this question, I provide a brief sketch of the development of the subdiscipline, showing how, in the most recent period, the dominance of economists, working with their own agenda and career motivations, has created obstacles for the dissemination of law and economics within the legal academy and to legal policy makers more generally. I argue that drawing out and communicating to this broader readership the major insights of law and economics remain important tasks. So also, from a normative perspective, to relate efficiency analysis to whatever non-economic goals may also influence particular areas of law. Across the huge range of his publications, Michael Trebilcock has provided a model for the law and economics scholarship that I am advocating.

Guido Calabresi ’ s The Future of Law & Economics

2017

Judge Guido Calabresi’s new book, The Future of Law & Economics: Essays in Reform and Recollection,1 is a passionate and convincing intellectual tour-de-force. It puts into context one of the most discussed (and controversial) issues in modern legal and economic thought: the appropriate relationship between law and economics. In eight clear and elegant essays, Judge Calabresi clarifies misconceptions involving the relationship between law and economics, convincingly concludes that economic analysis can be a useful tool in analyzing legal norms, enumerates the concepts that economic theorists must consider in order to effectively analyze the law, and shows how these concepts can be integrated into economic theory. In the first part of this review, and in order to put law and economics into context, we will enumerate the various approaches that scholars have used to analyze law and legal system. As we move into the relationship into law and economics, we will note Judge Calabresi’s di...