Law And Social Economics

This edited volume is the first collection of essays exploring the intersection of social economics and the law, providing alternatives to neoclassical law-and-economics and applying them to real-world issues. Law is a social enterprise concerned with values such as justice, dignity, and equality, as well as efficiency - which is the same way that social economists conceive of the economy itself. Social economists and legal scholars alike need to acknowledge the interrelationship between the economy and the law in a broader ethical context than enabled by mainstream law-and-economics. The ten chapters in Law and Social Economics, written by an international assortment of scholars from economics, philosophy, and law, employ a wide variety of approaches and methods to show how a more ethically nuanced approach to economics and the law can illuminate both fields and open up new avenues for studying social-economic behavior, policy, and outcomes in all their ethical and legal complexity.

The economic analysis of legal and regulatory issues need not be limited to the neoclassical economic approach. The expert contributors to this work employ a variety of heterodox legal-economic theories to address a broad range of legal issues. They demonstrate how these various approaches can lead to very different conclusions concerning the role of the law and legal intervention in a wide array of contexts. The schools of thought and methodologies represented here include institutional economics, new institutional economics, socio-economics, social economics, behavioral economics, game theory, feminist economics, Rawlsian economics, radical economics, Austrian economics, and personalist economics. The legal and regulatory issues examined include anti-trust and competition, corporate governance, the environment and natural resources, land use and property rights, unions and collective bargaining, welfare benefits, work-time regulation and standards, sexual harassment in the workplace, obligations of employers and employees to each other, crime, torts, and even the structure of government. Each contributor brings a different emphasis and provides thoughtful, sometimes provocative analysis and conclusions. Together, these heterodox insights will provide valuable supplementary reading for courses in law and economics as well as public policy and business courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

A book-length examination of the methodology and philosophy of law and economics.

Socio-economic rights raise many complex challenges to the traditional understanding of the nature of human rights, the role of courts in democratic society and the nature of remedies. This collection draws together the sophisticated and constructive solutions developed by the foremost thinkers to fully recognise socio-economic rights, demonstrating how traditional concepts and obstacles can be re-characterised and modified to ensure respect for the indivisibility of human rights. This important collection provides crucial insights into the emerging and perennial challenges to socio-economic rights. Including an original introduction, it is an ideal resource for those new to the study of socio-economic rights, academics, policy makers and all those interested in using human rights to achieve social justice.

Distinguished by brevity, lucid writing, and well-chosen examples, An Introduction to Law and Economics, now in its Fifth Edition, focuses on a set of core topics that include property, contracts, torts, criminal law, and litigation. Avoiding specialized jargon and mathematics, Polinsky teaches students how to think like an economist and understand legal issues from an economic perspective. New to the Fifth Edition: A streamlining of the products liability chapter A revised discussion of the redistributive effects of legal rules to reflect more recent scholarship on this topic The addition of several other refinements in the text and in new footnotes An updated bibliography Professors and students will benefit from: Solid coverage of relevant economic principles A normative approach that illustrates how to assess legal rules and policies in terms of economic and social goals Clear explanations of concepts

Reflecting a developing trend towards interdisciplinary research in economics and law, this agenda-setting volume makes the case for economic sociology of law – an emerging field that draws on empirical, analytical and normative insights from sociology to investigate relationships between legal and economic phenomena. It locates this novel subject in a wider socio-legal tradition and identifies common ground between Polanyian and Weberian approaches to the law, economy, and society, despite the two theorists’ divergent views on the functionality of the capitalist model. The volume provides a platform for researchers’ critical responses to the ‘social embeddedness’ of market societies. Contributors demonstrate the value of applying a combination of methods in their work, from heterogeneous disciplines such as legal history and ethnography. They consider the position in the western and developed nations, as well as in post-colonial polities. The resulting publication is a well-crafted primer on a specialism that, by combining the insights of socio-economic analysis with the formative influences exerted by their specific legal contexts, informs a more nuanced assessment of law, economics and society.

Evolutionary theory belongs to the rare species of theories that are simultaneously fundamental and over-arching, implicating as it does numerous life contexts as well as an array of scholarly disciplines. Armed with a profound grasp of evolutionary theory and its implications to social research, Professors Zumbansen and Calliess have mobilized an appropriately diverse and truly stellar group of academics to investigate how this theory may provide new insights about law, economics, and their inter-relations. Cast against an especially broad intellectual backdrop set by the editors, this volume is sure to become a standard reference in literature. Amir N. Licht, Radzyner School of Law, Israel Zumbansen and Calliess have done a wonderful job in assembling papers from the leading scholars in the field, who draw on evolutionary approaches for explaining developments in both economics and the law. Anybody interested in issues of institutional change will be inspired by the wealth of ideas and the diversity of perspectives. Stefan Voigt, University of Hamburg, Germany Law and economics has arguably become one of the most influential theories in contemporary legal theory and adjudication. The essays in this volume, authored by both legal scholars and economists, constitute lively and critical engagements between law and economics and new institutional economics from the perspectives of legal and evolutionary theory. The result is a fresh look at core concepts in law and economics such as institutions , institutional change and market failure that offer new perspectives on the relationship between economic and legal governance. The increasingly transnational dimension of regulatory governance presents lawyers, economists and social scientists with an unprecedented number of complex analytical and conceptual questions. The contributions to this volume engage with legal theory, new institutional economics, economic sociology and evolutionary economics in an interdisciplinary assessment of the capacities and limits of the state, markets and institutions. Drawing as well upon legal sociology and the philosophy of law, the authors expand and transform the known terrain of law and economics by applying evolutionary theory to both law and economics from a domestic and transnational perspective. Legal scholars, evolutionary and regulatory theorists, economists, economic sociologists, economic historians and political scientists will find this cutting-edge volume both challenging and engaging.

Law and Economics is an established field of research and arguably one of the few examples of a successful interdisciplinary project. This book explores whether, or to what extent, that interdisciplinarity has indeed been a success. It provides insights on the foundations and methods, achievements and challenges of Law and Economics, at a time when both the continuing criticism of academic economics and the growth of empirical legal studies raise questions about the identity and possible further developments of the project. Through a combination of reflections on long-term trends and detailed case studies, contributors to this volume analyse the institutional and epistemic character of Law and Economics, which develops through an exchange of concepts, models and practices between economics and legal scholarship. Inspired by insights from the philosophy of the social sciences, the book shows how concepts travel between legal scholarship and economics and change meanings when applied elsewhere, how economic theories and models inform, and transform, judicial practice, and it addresses whether the transfers of knowledge between economics and law are symmetrical exchanges between the two disciplines.