Economics and the Law

"[This book] provides an excellent introduction to the broad contours of Law and Economics... It can be especially recommended to readers interested in short but very informative overviews on different aspects of this discipline."--Hans-Bernd Schafer, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics "'You can't tell the players without a scorecard,' or so vendors at a baseball game say, and the Mercuro and Medema book under review provides team scorecards and much more: intellectual histories and outlines of the dominant styles of play by the Chicago school and its New Haven opponents, the public choice school and its civic republican opposition, institutional and neoinstitutional economics, and critical legal studies as a postmodern counterweight to the various economics enterprises."--Paul H. Brietzke, Valparaiso University Law Review "The authors' primary goal, which they achieve admirably, is to provide a concise review of the major scholarly traditions that use economic analysis of the law... [T]he descriptions of each tradition are clear and painstakingly evenhanded... This brief volume provides a sound understanding of each tradition's virtues and weaknesses."--Constitutional Political Economy "It is arguable that over the past 20 years, roughly the years of the Volker and Greenspan Federal Reserve Boards, the branch of study that goes by the name Law and Economics has had more influence on public economic policy than any other academic discourse... In the face of such a shift in thinking about public policy, it is important to have a fair-minded primer that clearly explains the various aspects of thinking about law and economics in the policy arena today. This book attempts to provide just such a primer. It is notable for the clarity and fairness of its exposition of what are controversial debates about the proper direction for economic policy."--John Henry Schiegel, Southern Economic Journal