ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Negotiating Economic Analysis of Law: Economists, Lawyers, and the Coase Theorem
Author: Medema Steven
In December 1965, apparently at the instigation of George Washington University Law School professor Henry Manne, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and the American Economic Association (AEA) established an ad hoc Joint Committee of the two associations. The purpose of this committee, according to the report published in the AALS Proceedings for 1967, was “to explore the possibilities of collaborative efforts between the two organizations and the desirability of establishing a joint committee as a standing committee of the two organizations.” What emerged, however, was something more narrowly drawn than a general exploration of the prospects for increased interaction between lawyers and economists. This paper examines the origins and early activities of this Joint Committee, including the most prominent manifestation of its initial efforts, a symposium on “Products Liability: Economic Analysis and the Law,” which took place at Stanford University in 1969. What will emerge from this analysis is a clear sense that the early work of the committee was far less about promoting increased interaction between economists and legal scholars than about a conscious attempt to use this committee to help fashion a particular form of “law and economics” that would reshape legal analysis, and that one of the consequences of this effort was the arousal of some concern among both lawyers and economists associated with the project regarding the conclusions that could be drawn from an economic analysis of law and even the ability of economics to inform legal thinking.
Registred web users only can download this paper - Go back
Please note that files available for download have not been checked for viruses. These files have been submitted by authors of the conference to this web site. Conference organisers can't accept any responsibility for damages caused to users by downloading such files.