Idols of the Right: The Law-and-Economics Movement
Tushnet, Mark
For the past two decades conservative legal theorists have propagated two right-wing approaches to law. Most public attention has focused on the theory of "original intent" as a guide to...
...Feminist Legal Theory For feminists and postmodernists, what was a voluntary choice, a free exchange, was actually a socially constructed, historically contingent fact...
...More broadly still, the legal academy's search for an external foundation for law has made it parasitic on whatever happened to be highly regarded in the general culture at the time...
...But the reasons for its influence go deeper...
...And, even if deals occur, the cost of engaging in the deal is basically waste...
...Law-and-economics, then, got its start because it addressed real problems in legal thought that were the legacy of legal realism...
...Four prominent economists who addressed legal issues—George Stigler, James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, and Gary Becker—received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science...
...For a moment it seemed possible that it would become the leading dialect, dominating the conversation of law...
...That, though, played into another view, that legislatures were places where discussion did not matter but "mere" politics, the play of preferences, did...
...And, perhaps more important, the argument predicts that cases ought to come out roughly fifty-fifty for the plaintiff and the defendant...
...Outside the legal academy, law-andeconomics has been contained by what most practicing lawyers see as the world's complexity...
...they were not, being substantially more conservative than either), but because its intellectual program seemed, at least for a while, to solve persistent problems in centrist legal thought...
...Now suppose I do not have a right to work under safe conditions...
...Leading elements of the legal academy have been associated with the center-left since the late 1940s, in part because of the long-term dominance of the New Deal coalition in American politics, in part because conservatives believed that working in the private sector was more socially valuable than working in the academy, and in part because conservatives who went into the academy gave up more, financially, than liberals who did the same...
...The cost of making those deals is wasted...
...If we make that assumption, proponents of law-and-economics ask, what should be the legal rules about accidents, contracts, crime, procedure, and everything else...
...In the 1970s a group of male legal academics, adopting the name "Critical Legal Studies," revitalized the skeptical strands of legal realism and offered a leftist alternative in which law was seen as a complex reflection of politics and culture...
...It was also supported by material and cultural features of the law school scene...
...President Reagan's appointment of Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, prominent advocates of law-and-economics, to the federal courts symbolizes that fit...
...Simple law-and-economics models were vulnerable in other ways...
...In the next decade law-and-economics seems likely to continue to be one of the languages that lawyers and policy-makers speak...
...A11 this is pretty neat, and it certainly appealed to the scientific urges that were part of the legal realist legacy...
...The simple models had another advantage...
...People familiar with law could not be confident that judges or legislators would get it right— reintroducing the problem of lawmaking discretion that post-realists tried to suppress...
...Their critique of formalism established that interpreting the Constitution was no more determinate than any other exercise in legal logic...
...Erasing the analytic distinction between the public and private was troubling enough, for ideological reasons...
...So, legal FALL • 1993 477 The Law-and-Economics Movement rules might be used to ensure that both sides have the same information...
...The easy answer— a right-wing movement in legal thought accompanied the rise of right-wing politics—has no more than a grain of truth...
...it is likely to be positively harmful, taking wealth from the diffuse taxpaying or consuming majority and transferring it to those who already are relatively well-to-do...
...And the argument that courts cannot do anything is strongly counterintuitive and, it turns out, inconsistent with a lot of empirical evidence...
...According to that approach, we ought to think of legislatures as markets for policies, in which voters demand—and politicians supply...
...Once an intellectual force that threatened to disrupt the centrist commitments of the legal academy, it has become tamed, normalized, and compartmentalized within the academy...
...Perhaps surprisingly, Coase and Calabresi showed that, if people could easily make deals with each other, it did not matter what the legal rules were...
...Legislatures, in short, should not do very much, and courts could not do very much...
...It turns out to be fairly easy to generate economic models in which the law can be persistently bad...
...Law, they argued, should promote the policies to which a democratic society was committed, with those policies described so abstractly that no one could seriously disagree with them: promoting security, enhancing material wellbeing, ensuring liberty, and the like...
...By defining basic policies so abstractly, these post-realists created the possibility of reestablishing the distinction between law and politics...
...Law-and-economics needs arguments to limit the role of legislatures and judges to respond to legal realist concerns...
...For some in the mainstream, some versions of feminism provided that alternative...
...they cannot deal well with the more complicated ones that characterize leading work in the field today...
...More important, the economic assumption at the base of law-and-economics was that people tried to do the best they could with what they had...
...Now it seems likely to play a smaller role...
...Thus, the occasional judicial forays into law-and-economics are vastly outnumbered by more traditional legal analyses...
...Finding that many women described their choices—to remain in abusive households, to participate in producing pornography— as voluntary when the choices seemed quite constrained, they pointed out that people always made "choices" in social settings that themselves helped define what was a voluntary choice and what a coerced or constrained one...
...Beyond differences in outcome, the reduction of law to politics, which legal realism seemed to require, posed a serious problem for liberal ideology...
...If there were a different distribution of wealth, there would be a different set of efficient policies...
...The public-choice arguments, though, are too cynical about politics: Of course special interests have an important, and perhaps undesirable, part in politics, but somehow legislators do sometimes respond to the demands of the public interest...
...First, they relegated questions of wealth distribution to the legislature...
...Some public-choice theorists have argued that their vision of the political process means that courts should interpret interest-group statutes quite narrowly and, more interestingly, that they should interpret the Constitution to bar legislatures from enacting interest-group statutes...
...The key to skepticism about legislation as a response either to failures in economic markets or to problems of wealth distribution is a pair of arguments...
...Law-and-economics became prominent in the law schools in part because its message fit comfortably with the politics of the 1980s...
...Law-and-economics could offer no leverage on the problems it purported to address once that understanding spread through the legal academy...
...A great deal of law, even outside the area of constitutional law, was made by judges...
...If I think that, overall, I will be better off with higher pay, I will exchange my "right" to a safe workplace for the higher pay...
...Judges, then, may sometimes use economic metaphors, but on the whole they believe that the traditional language of law captures life's complexity more accurately than the simplifications of law-and-economics...
...This validation of their work—and, by inference, the work of their disciples in law schools—has bolstered the position of law-andeconomics in the law schools, even though Stigler and Coase in particular have expressed some skepticism about how legal academics have used economics...
...The growth of government, though, made the elimination of the distinction positively threatening...
...This is an extraordinary arrangement...
...More complicated models have more ambiguous policy implications...
...If the solutions reached through litigation differed from the solutions reached in legislatures, the "legal" solutions could have little claim on the public...
...Although some isolated subcategories of cases do come out that way, far more categories are tilted one way or the other...
...The difficulty was exacerbated by the obvious point that judges and lawyers represented a quite narrow stratum of the social and economic system...
...To distinguish policy from politics, they had to find a way to conduct "policy" inquiries that were more neutral than the sheer clash of preferences that characterized politics...
...Deals move resources—money and working conditions—to where they are most valued by the people making the deals...
...Ronald Reagan's judicial appointments— Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook to the Chicago appellate court, Antonin Scalia first to the D.C...
...Finally, they argued that courts actually did not have much discretion...
...Only a few deals will have to be made, with those few workers who prefer higher pay and unsafe conditions...
...In the end, "law as policy science" was vulnerable to the basic legal realist challenges, but it took some time for that to become apparent...
...Law-and-economics had gotten its start by filling a vacuum in liberal legal theory created by legal realism...
...What results, however, are increasingly technical articles, which noneconomists find difficult to assimilate into their vision of law...
...If I have a nice house, I will rarely sell it for what I would be willing to offer on an equivalent house: I will ask for more than I would offer, simply because I have the house at the start of bargaining...
...In the early decades of the twentieth century formalists tended to be laissez-faire conservatives, and the principles they placed at the base of law were highly individualist and conservative...
...Legal formalism, for all its defects, forcefully distinguished between the public domain, in which government was authorized to act, and the private one, protected against government intrusion by fundamental rights, including constitutional rights...
...By giving the "right" to the people who will end up with it most of the time, transaction costs are kept down...
...Law, these realists said, promoted the policies society sought to achieve...
...other workers, with different preferences, will work in safe conditions for $4.00...
...And then the policy recommendations are inextricably intertwined with ambiguous empirical questions: are the markets providing employment opportunities to inner-city teenagers ones where minimumwage laws really do work...
...These moves responded to legal realist concerns and, not coincidentally, lent support to government policies of leaving the distribution of wealth undisturbed and letting people do what they wanted to with the resources they happened to have: the intellectual agenda of post-realist thought pushed the analysis to the right...
...Suppose that we find out that most of the time workers prefer safe working conditions...
...So, even if judges get the right rule by sheer accident, that rule will become a permanent part of the law...
...Formalists believed that legal rules could be deduced, using ordinary logic, from a relatively small set of fundamental principles...
...In some ways that is a sad commentary on the life of an intellectual movement...
...Probably the most effective example critics have developed involves sexual harassment in the workplace: If the law gives women the right to be free of sexual harassment, they ordinarily will demand much more extra pay to waive that right than they would be willing to give up if they had to purchase the "right" from their employers...
...Law-and-economics might break those bonds if it could become sufficiently complex...
...Law-and-economics relied on the "publicchoice" approach to legislation...
...If workers are desperately poor, they may "choose" to work for $4.00 in unsafe conditions, so giving them a right to safe working conditions will make them better off...
...The argument that courts did not have much discretion was simple and, in the end, quite unpersuasive...
...And, when there are a lot of people on one side of a deal, coordinating their demands is quite difficult...
...More recent developments in feminist legal theory, which fit together with postmodemist versions of multiculturalism, are less acceptable to the mainstream...
...First, there are some general difficulties in making sure that the right deals are made...
...If they do not have a right to safe working conditions, employers will offer $5.00 and unsafe conditions, and then lots of deals will have to be made before the workers end up with safe conditions and $4.00...
...Still, it was not completely satisfactory...
...Law-and-economics began to take hold in the legal academy during the 1970s, before rightwing politics of an equally conservative sort became as prominent in national politics...
...More important, the foundation has funded law students themselves: in exchange for a lawandeconomics grant—in effect, a reduction in tuition—students are required to enroll in a law-and-economics seminar, for which they also get law school credit...
...Law-and-economics became more diffuse, its policy implications more ambiguous and more easily assimilable to the centrist inclinations of the legal academy, and it became more isolated as a sub-discipline with an agenda of decreasing interest to those outside the subdiscipline...
...Law-and-economics became important, not because its politics were congenial with those of the legal academy and the general public This article is the first in an occasional series of critiques of current right-wing thought...
...The early realists were political progressives who disagreed with the formalists' conservative principles...
...Observing people who come before them in criminal cases and imposing sentences, they know that the cost-benefit calculations that economists use to model the idea that criminal law is a deterrent are only part of the phenomenon of criminal behavior...
...Economists have tried to minimize the offerasking problem, saying that it arises only in special situations (primarily, where the asset— like the house—is a significant part of a person's wealth), but casual observation suggests that the difficulty is more pervasive...
...To use a more contemporary example, realists would argue that choosing to leave the distribution of sexually explicit materials unregulated was as much a choice as regulating that distribution...
...These difficulties were exacerbated by the massive alteration in government's role accomplished by the New Deal...
...Entrepreneurs and outside financing are just a small part of the cultural setting in which law-and-economics flourished...
...The conservative John M. Olin Foundation has supported programs in law-and-economics at several law schools...
...That was, its proponents argued, one of the least controversial abstract goals for policy scientists to promote...
...This would make law-and-economics uninteresting, except for the crucial point...
...It turns out, though, that whether a trade occurs depends on who is entitled to what in the first place...
...The foundation's funds bring outside law-and-economics speakers to faculties, creating a source of "patronage" for the heads of the programs at each law school...
...In contrast, as long as a bad rule is part of the law, cases will arise challenging it...
...Figuring out what the true transaction costs were, and how to keep them down, might seem to be a technical exercise, but it was not a simple one...
...Its grip outside the academy was always weaker, and with the accession of a Democratic administration the hold of law-andeconomics seems likely to weaken further...
...But the simplicity could not be sustained...
...The law journals are filled with law-and-economics articles, and no law school believes itself respectable until it has at least one advocate of law-and-economics on its faculty...
...In the meantime, "law as policy science" became transmuted into law-andeconomics...
...Everyone conceded from the outset that law-and-economics' normative claims about efficiency had to be separated from questions about distribution of wealth, because, on the technical level, exchanges between people produce efficient outcomes only with respect to the distribution of wealth already in place...
...Publicchoice theorists have struggled without much success to explain how "public-interest" statutes like environmental laws manage to get enacted, for example...
...Legal rules can help solve these coordination problems, for example, by allowing any one person to get an injunction that would block the deal...
...Posner attempted to meet this objection by providing a different basis for the normative claims: instead of trying to maximize utility, which he conceded could not provide a sensible guide to policy, we could, Posner argued, try to maximize wealth measured in monetary terms...
...They insisted that principles of justice could fill the gaps that legal realism found in law, and their political program was compatible with center-liberal desires...
...Historical experience showed that at one time people accepted some working conditions as "natural," not places about which real choices could be made, and therefore "chose" to work under those conditions without raising questions about pay...
...By speaking of policy science, they reestablished the neutrality of law...
...In some versions, feminism still promises to be more comfortable to the centrists who control the legal academy than do law-and-economics or critical legal studies...
...In one decision reflecting realist ideas, for example, the Supreme Court said in effect that the government always made regulatory decisions: Letting the consequences of a "natural" disaster lie where they fell, the Court said, was "none the less a choice" than choosing a rule to "shift" the effects from one group to another...
...The simple models depended on claims that voluntary trades between people made both sides better off (otherwise, why would they have traded...
...The Cultural Setting Some entrepreneurial law professors, most notably Henry Manne (now dean at the George Mason University Law School), saw law-andeconomics as a vehicle for institutional and personal advancement that was compatible with their ideological predispositions...
...But, even if that idea could be worked out, other criticisms are more fundamental...
...Critics of law-and-economics developed other technical objections...
...Although they attacked those principles, their more enduring challenge was to formalism itself, of any sort...
...Lawyers could appropriate the simple versions of law-and-economics...
...I will end up working in unsafe conditions for $5.00...
...Indeed, disciplinary pressures push in that direction...
...Both steps were accomplished when post—legal realists described law as a "policy science...
...That answer, however, was troublesome...
...As practicing lawyers, they developed "practical" approaches to legal issues...
...In the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, there was a flurry of interest in psychology and psychoanalysis, which has left no trace in current legal scholarship...
...One legacy of the New Deal, though, was persistent concern in lawmaking for the distribution of wealth—that is, for worrying about what people had when they went into the marketplace to make deals...
...For them, law was nothing other than politics conducted in a special forum...
...Law-and-economics took law's goal to be promoting "efficiency" or economic well-being...
...It began with the unromantic assumption, widely shared in the legal academy and beyond, that questions about the proper distribution of wealth cannot really be answered through rational discussion...
...The point of law-and-economics then became trying to make sure that people could make the right deals...
...No one believes it, though...
...The New Deal, and its validation by the Supreme Court, showed that there were now no limits on what governments could do, and that governments actually might start doing quite a bit...
...At the start, law-and-economics offered a simple, reductionist analysis of law and a vision of the good society...
...Contemporary legal thought has been shaped by two experiences: American legal realism and the New Deal transformation of government...
...q 482 • DISSENT...
...After the simple models have been developed, the only way to advance is to 480 • DISSENT The Law-and-Economics Movement introduce new variables and greater complexity...
...minimumwage laws were a bad idea because they reduced employment opportunities for lowskilled, entry-level workers, ordinarily teenagers in inner cities...
...And it ended up promoting a right-wing political agenda that fit comfortably into the contemporary political scene...
...If it costs something to make a deal—if there are, as Coase put it, transaction costs (costs associated with engaging in transacting)—then it will matter what the legal rules are...
...Outside the legal academy, Judges Posner and Easterbrook were among only a few judges with some sophistication about economics and law...
...But, because postmodernist feminists manage to retain their connection to liberal feminism on many issues, the mainstream in the legal academy continues to see feminism as an alternative to law-andeconomics...
...Suppose I have a legal right to work under safe conditions, but also have the right to trade that right for higher pay...
...The public rhetoric of liberalism, if not its official theory, made much of the difference between politics, where people simply fought over what they wanted, and law, where people were regulated by principles transcending personal interests...
...The legal academy found the claim that issues of distribution of wealth should be left to legislatures largely uncontroversial...
...The growth of law-and-economics reached its limit primarily for the reasons that made it important in the first place...
...Whether workers have a right to a safe workplace or not, that is, they will end up working for the combination of pay and safety they prefer...
...Once the courts manage to develop the right rule, no one will bring a lawsuit challenging that rule...
...If a worker does not know how risky it is to use some exotic chemical, and the employer does, the exchange of unsafe working conditions for a higher wage will not be correct (unless we make some rather strong assumptions about how markets for information work...
...If legal logic did not generate the FALL • 1993 • 475 The Law-and-Economics Movement results lawmakers arrived at, what did...
...If those principles were merely a fancy way to obscure the interests that the law really promoted, the reason for giving law special authority seemed to disappear...
...Although critical legal studies has influenced mainstream legal thinking, its political perspective was unacceptable, and its insistence on the legal realist insights obviously failed to satisfy the mainstream's demand for an alternative to legal realism...
...Why, in a democratic society, should judges determine the rules dealing with liability for industrial accidents or the rules regulating the duties landlords owed tenants, if law was simply another form of politics...
...Often these judges seem to write "for the law schools," addressing the issues raised by their cases in ways that make it more likely that their opinions will make their way, if not into the law, at least into the casebooks from which students learn the law...
...Further, politicians are like entrepreneurs, trying to do the best they can for themselves, which usually means doing what is necessary to ensure reelection...
...But the legal realist critique of formalism established that there was no analytic distinction to be made between the public sphere and the private one...
...If law-and-economics wants the rule to come out right, judges have to exercise choice...
...Their colleagues are, by and large, much more ordinary lawyers, educated in an era when the language of economics was rarely used in law schools...
...It was no accident that Justice Felix Frankfurter, the leading proponent of a view of the Constitution that authorized the New Deal, was also a leading proponent of judicial restraint in interpreting the limits the Bill of Rights placed on government authority...
...it adds nothing to social well-being...
...Why did law-and-economics become a significant movement in legal thought...
...They are, instead, questions about which people have strongly held but essentially nonrational views...
...The feminist movement had another effect...
...Nor, according to realists, could anyone seriously contend that society had no choice in the matter because it was constrained by the First Amendment...
...The legal realists, whose jurisprudence found its source in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's early work, and which displaced all competitors in the 1930s, began by criticizing the legal formalism that predominated when they began writing...
...The Future During the 1980s it seemed as if law-andeconomics might become the law of the future...
...The Principles of Law-and-Economics Law-and-economics applies the basic assumption of economics—that people try to get the most out of what they have (are "rational maximizers")—to law...
...If some employers find it profitable to use some unhealthy materials, they will offer me more to work for them—say, $5.00 an hour—than employers who find it profitable to use only safe materials, who will offer me only $4.00...
...The offer-asking problem is only one among several difficulties that arise in trying to work out the notion that voluntary trades are efficient...
...Things get sorted out only if people can make deals at no cost to them...
...Then, they argued that legislatures were so ridden with interest-group pressures that they could not do a good job of determining the right distribution of wealth...
...First, people who have more wealth in the first place are going to be more influential in the market for public policy, so laws that purport to affect the distribution of wealth are probably not going to be very effective...
...Unsurprisingly, the legal academy is oriented toward those who hold power...
...Rather, the argument went, lawyers could use their technical expertise—the "science" part of policy science—to determine, in a neutral way, what legal rules best promoted the abstractly defined goals...
...Some employers will offer me safe conditions in exchange for lower pay—$4.00...
...Legislation, then, is going to be worse than ineffective...
...The law-and-economics starting point, the assumption that people are rational maximizers, seems sensible enough, if not carried too far...
...The mainstream needed a left/liberal alternative to law-and-economics that addressed legal realism's concerns...
...In contrast, if workers do have a right to safe working conditions, employers will offer safe conditions and $4.00 from the beginning, which is what most workers want...
...But, 476 • DISSENT The Lew-and-Economics Movement although politics might be one way to promote those policies, politics was too undisciplined...
...Day by day, in every way, the law gets better and better...
...The field of law-and-economics really got its start with two articles, one published in 1960 by Ronald Coase, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1991, and the other published in 1961 by Guido Calabresi, now dean of Yale Law School...
...The first generation of feminist legal theorists sought to extend the principles of liberal equality to encompass women's concerns...
...This argument is elegant...
...Second, concentrated interest groups— business lobbyists and labor unions—are going to win out over the public interest—consumers and taxpayers—because it is much easier to organize (get campaign contributions from) concentrated groups...
...Some workers will think they will be better off with lower pay and safe conditions, while others will work for the higher pay — $5.00 —in unsafe conditions...
...FALL • 1993 • 481 The Law-and-Economies Movement A worker might "choose" to get a little more pay for working with hazardous chemicals, but it became hard to see that choice as truly voluntary unless it was really possible for the workers to find another job for less pay in a safer workplace...
...after most people have signed on, the rest can hold out for a better deal, or each one might make a deal that seems best for him or her personally, only to discover that they all could have done better if they had coordinated their demands...
...Law-and-economics is the heir to one of the products of that search...
...Eventually, even a court acting randomly will accidentally get the right rule...
...Perhaps the most interesting is the "offer-asking" problem...
...The basic idea was that people bring lawsuits only if the legal rules they face impose inefficient results on them—make it too costly to make the right deal...
...Its simplicity promised to solve the intellectual problems of explaining how and why lawyers and judges exercised power...
...They argued that legal materials were so complex and contradictory that nothing in particular could be deduced by legal logic...
...now it seems likely to be only a specialized discourse, to be used or abandoned as seems helpful...
...Feminists and others drawing on postmodernist thought have raised questions about the coherence of the idea of "voluntary" action itself...
...appellate court and then to the Supreme Court, and others less in the public eye but well known in law schools—made law-and-economics ideas part of "the law," not just the academy...
...Unfortunately for its proponents, the necessary arguments are also unpersuasive...
...Virtually no one found this satisfactory, because it made the relation between distribution of wealth and the normative claims both apparent and decidedly unattractive: Why on earth should we find a world in which the wealthy were exceedingly wealthy and the poor grindingly poor more attractive than one in which there was less wealth overall but where the wealthy were merely quite well-to-do and the poor were only moderately poor...
...And, perhaps more important, the legal academy was dominated by centrists when law-and-economics became prominent, and has remained so...
...So, it 478 • DISSENT The Law-and-Economics Movement seems, judicial discretion cannot be eliminated...
...Most public attention has focused on the theory of "original intent" as a guide to interpreting the Constitution...
...Second, law-and-economics tried to keep transaction costs low by reducing the number of times people have to engage in deals...
...Within the legal academy and outside it, feminism provided an increasingly strong liberal counterweight to the conservative politics of law-and-economics...
...This had two parts...
...Justice Scalia, for example, has relied on public-choice ideas in explaining (or rationalizing) his opposition to affirmative action programs, which he sees as responses to pressures from concentrated women's interest groups at the expense of men, who fall in no "protected categories" in the law...
...They generated clear policy recommendations: requiring landlords to maintain their premises was a bad idea because landlords would simply raise the rent and reduce the supply of affordable low-income housing...
...These judges believe that the world with which law deals is much more complicated than the one depicted by law-and-economics...
...The legal realists' critique of formalism left them with what they thought was a serious problem...
...In a famous article, for example, Karl Llewellyn, a relatively moderate legal realist, compiled a list of "canons" of statutory interpretation and matched each item on the list with an equally well-supported contradictory canon...
...If transaction costs are too high, some deals that should be made will not be made, and society is the loser (because resources end up in the wrong hands...
...Ens...
...During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Manne exposed a FALL • 1993 • 479 The Lew-and-Economics Movement large number of law professors to the simple versions of law-and-economics then available, and encouraged them to take the lessons back to their classrooms...
...The trick was to convert "politics" into "policy...
...Although some legal realists were willing to live with the demystifying consequences of their jurisprudence, most searched for some way to reestablish the authority of law...
...They may identify situations in which landlords will not be able to raise the rents or employment markets in which minimum-wage laws do not disadvantage entry-level workers...
...In many ways treating law as policy science reverted to formalism: abstractly defined policies took the place that fundamental principles occupied in formalism, and scientific and technical expertise took the place of legal logic...
...Yet at other times people treated the same working conditions as changeable and therefore demanded more pay for riskier work...
...The final move, deprecating the ability of legislatures, was harder to make persuasive...
...One group of legal realists gave an answer: politics...
...In the law schools, though, the theory of "Law-andEconomics" has had far greater impact...
...Law-and-economics theorists had a series of linked moves to respond to the problems of lawmaking discretion and wealth distribution...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
