Corporate & Securities Law

The Future of Law and Economics, Part 1

I’m very interested in the history, the present, and the future of the law and economics methodology and movement. Recently, I’ve been giving some thought to the direction of the movement, especially as it currently exists in the legal academy. Some of my thinking has been inspired by this post from Larry Ribstein, the comments to this post at Prawfs (especially those from Brian Leiter and Kate Litvak), and Steven M. Teles’ book on the Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, each of which highlights some of the trends and tensions emerging in the field as well as what has made it so successful. Much of the discussion in those blog posts has to do with whether a Ph.D. is necessary or sufficient to do modern L&E scholarship, or at least, whether there is room interdisciplinary scholarship for those without the PhD or equivalent technical skills. That all debate has been hammered out fairly thoroughly. My target in what I hope will be a series of posts is different, though not orthogonal to that debate: where is L&E now and where is it going?

There are a couple of general trends pushing on the law and economics movement from different directions that make speculation about the future of the movement interesting and raise a number of interesting questions. I don’t think I know the answers to these questions, but I thought it would be fun to write a series of blog posts that sketch out my tentative thinking on these general trends, identify some potential strengths and weaknesses of the L&E movement in its current form, share some thoughts about where it is headed, and hopefully stimulate some discussion.

In this first post, I’m going to try to set the stage by identifying some of the trends in the L&E movement in particular and their causes and consequences. In future posts, I’ll try to shed some light on where I think the L&E movement in law schools is going, where it isn’t going, and where I’d like it to go in the next 5-10 years. First, lets start by sketching the landscape with the identification and description of some general trends and patterns in L&E below fold.

Full post as published by Truth on the Market on April 28, 2008 (boomark / email).