The Intellectual Roots of the Law and Economics Movement

Abstract

I will summarize my reactions to Hackney's article, then elaborate on them. First, the paper mistakenly interprets an analytical categorization used by modern economists distinguishing efficiency and distribution issues as a politically biased convention. Second, it fails to appreciate a crucial distinction between prices or incentives as motivating devices and compensation to victims or aggrieved parties as a form of social redistribution. Finally, it misreads the intellectual history of the modern law and economics movement. Far from being a byproduct of an antistatist academic economics establishment, law and economics began as an eccentric subfield of economics, cut off from the discipline's postwar mainstream.