Abstract
The principal intellectual impetus behind progressive scholarship in business law' over the last twenty years has been provided by borrowings from economics.2 However, this impetus faces serious resistance from two directions. The first is traditional legal scholarship, which regards these borrowings as inappropriate to legal reasoning and finds comfort in so doing as these borrowings have tended to question formerly unquestionable beliefs. This type of 'intellectual friction'3 is unfortunate but is to be expected.4 Without wishing to deny the political importance of overcoming this friction, I regard it as theoretically uninteresting. More significant is the resistance to the economic analysis of business law mounted by another form of criticism of traditional legal scholarship, 'socio-legal scholarship'. Socio-legal scholarship tends to be associated with broadly left-wing political commitment because the explanations of bourgeois legal institutions which it provides show those institutions to be significantly irrational. I myself accept this in relation to business law since I believe that capitalist markets are poor allocative mechanisms and that the social relationships built upon them tend to be profoundly degrading. From this position, a rejection of law and economics may follow because law and economics scholarship is redolent with sometimes extreme right-wing political
Published Version
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