POSNER, ECONOMICS AND THE LAW: FROM “LAW AND ECONOMICS” TO ANECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF LAW

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss Posner's economic analysis of law and its place in the evolution of the law and economics movement. The importance of Posner's contribution is widely acknowledged in the literature. However, it is generally considered as simply another step in the evolution of the law and economics movement, rather than as an important departure from traditional law and economics. This reflects a larger issue in the history of law and economics: that most of the standard internalist treatments of the subject make no clear-cut difference between ''law and economics'' and ''the economic analysis of law.'' Thus, the terms ''law and economics'' and ''economic analysis of law'' are used interchangeably to describe any economic work dealing with law or legal rules published after 1960-that is, any contribution to ''new law and economics.'' Coase, for his part, receives a central place because of his path-breaking 1960 article, The Problem of the Social Cost. A turning point in the evolution of the field, it represents the ''origin [of ]. .. the modern law and economics movement'' (Hovenkamp 1990, p. 494; emphasis added) and marks the passage from an ''old''

The future of law and economics and the legacy of Guido Calabresi

“…This distinction is actually the one that was already put forward by Ronald Coase, for instance (in Epstein et al 1997), and historically documented, i.e. between "law and economics" and an "economic analysis of law" (see Harnay and Marciano 2009;Marciano, 2019; see also Marciano and Ramello, and Hylton this issue). On the relationship between Bentham, Beccaria and other European thinkers see also Miceli (2018).…”

Should I help my neighbor? Self-interest, altruism and economic analyses of rescue laws

“…For example, the analysis of the social costs of crime has led to a change in the thinking of economists about the monopoly problem'' (Landes and Posner 1978b, p. 417). 29 One has to keep in mind that in the articles Posner wrote in 1972 and, only a few years before, Posner always gave definitions of his approach (see Harnay and Marciano 2009, for details on that). In 1978, it appears that Posner did not feel the necessity to define ''law and economics'' in articles published in the JLS while he did in an article written for an economic audience.…”

“…This also yields an extension of the domain of investigation to a wide range of new areas-such as the production of case-law, the functioning of the judiciary, the legal procedure, and more generally ''the central institutions of the legal system'' (Posner 1975, p. 39). Finally, the adoption of the beckerian conception of economics as a toolbox-or, in Posner's words, ''an open-ended set of concepts'' (Posner 1987, p. 2)-''opened up to economic analysis large areas of the legal system not reached by Calabresi's and Coase''s studies of property rights and liability rules'' (Posner 1975, p. 761) (for more details, see Harnay and Marciano 2009). This is meaningful therefore that rescue behaviours have shifted from an essentially moral and individual sphere to the legal sphere at that time, as we have shown in the former section.…”

Wandering Through the Borderlands of the Social Sciences: Gary Becker’sEconomics of Discrimination

“…6 Our point is not to trace the intellectual origins of the expansion of the scope of economics (as in Hurtado 2008, for instance) or to discuss its methodological content, but to recount an important episode of the history of the changing boundaries of the social sciences in the light of the surrounding historical and scientific context. This article adds to other efforts to study various attempts by economists to explore issues outside the traditional scope of their discipline (e.g., Medema 2000, Fontaine 2007, and Harnay and Marciano 2009 and contributes to the growing literature on the history of cross-disciplinary research ventures after the Second World War (see also Backhouse and Fontaine 2010). It also offers a contribution to the literature on the history of the Chicago school (e.g., Emmett 2010), which, so far, has not specifically addressed the expansion of the scope of economics.…”