SOCIAL SCIENCES AND LAW: THE RELEVANCE OF ECONOMIC THEORIES

Abstract

There can be no doubt about the enormous strides in legal scholarship incorporating social sciences (and especially economics) over the past twenty years since the seminal article by Ronald Coase on social cost was published in the Journal of Law and Economics. US legal scholars and economists have given the lead in this development, though Britain now is following hard on their heels, in part as a consequence of research support from the Social Science Research Council.' Economists have been appointed to tenured positions in many US law schools, and research centres specialising in law and economics have been established for example at Chicago, Emery and Pennsylvania. Leading textbooks by Posner2 and by Hirsch3 have been published in law and economics and several specialist journals have achieved academic and commercial success whilst conventional law journals (in Britain) such as the Cambridge Law Journal, the Modern Law Review and the Law Quarterly Review now publish articles which contain substantial inputs of economics. With this revolution there has appeared some confusion over the contrasting methodologies of the two disciplines, both concerning the positive analysis of the precise impact of legal rules on resource allocation and concerning alleged ideological biasses in normative analyses of the role of the courts and the efficiency of their rules and judgments. In this paper, I shall centre attention upon such matters.