Essential blogsurfing today:
Posner on the Overlapping Generations of Law and Economics by Josh Wright.
Law’s Primacy in L&E by Keith Sharfman.
Both posts react to Richard Posner's review of Steven Shavell’s Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law in the most recent issue of Journal of Economic Literature (June 2006). AEA members can access the full text here. Options for others are here. Here's the abstract from the review:
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.
And a quote from the review:
“It is curious but true that, although economics is intellectually more sophisticated than law and though there is—recognition of this point is close to the heart of economic analysis of law—a considerable isomorphism between law and economics, no one, however bright, who is not a lawyer can get the law quite right. Law is like a language that you have to be a native speaker of to speak correctly.”
Well, yes.
