Review essay. The New Palgrave: surveying two waves of economic analysis of law

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 407-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
AS Edlin
2006 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A Posner

Steven Shavell's Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law (Harvard University Press, 2004) is a major theoretical contribution to “law and economics,” the applied field of economics that studies the economic properties and consequences of legal doctrines and institutions. It is a field of immense practical importance, but unfamiliar to many economists—a situation that Shavell's book bids fair to rectify. This review essay situates Shavell's book in the history of economic scholarship about law and uses the book as a springboard for speculation about new directions in that scholarship.


Author(s):  
Eyal Zamir ◽  
Doron Teichman

In the past few decades, economic analysis of law has been challenged by a growing body of experimental and empirical studies that attest to prevalent and systematic deviations from the assumptions of economic rationality. While the findings on bounded rationality and heuristics and biases were initially perceived as antithetical to standard economic and legal-economic analysis, over time they have been largely integrated into mainstream economic analysis, including economic analysis of law. Moreover, the impact of behavioral insights has long since transcended purely economic analysis of law: in recent years, the behavioral movement has become one of the most influential developments in legal scholarship in general. Behavioral Law and Economics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the field. The book surveys the entire body of psychological research underpinning behavioral analysis of law, and critically evaluates the core methodological questions of this area of research. The book then discusses the fundamental normative questions stemming from the psychological findings on bounded rationality, and explores their implications for establishing the aims of legislation, and the means of attaining them. This is followed by a systematic and critical examination of the contributions of behavioral studies to all major fields of law—property, contracts, consumer protection, torts, corporate, securities regulation, antitrust, administrative, constitutional, international, criminal, and evidence law—as well as to the behavior of key players in the legal arena: litigants and judicial decision-makers.


1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Feeley ◽  
Richard A. Posner

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