Origins of Law and Economics: The Economists' New ... (ISBN 0521023866)

Book Description:
In the 1830's, the "new science of law" aimed to explain the working rules of human society by using the methodologically individual terms of economic discourse. Practitioners were inclined to admit altruistic values, bounded rationality, and institutional inertia into their research programs.

Law and economics did not start in Chicago around 1960:
This book is written by a historian and deals with law-and-economics avant la lettre in Europe. It is worth every penny of its rather expensive $64.95 for 202 pages. In a very rich survey, it shows how during the 19th and early 20th century, Europeans, Germans in particular, and some Americans asked the same questions about the origins of property rights and the role of legal institutions, as did American law-and-economics scholars from the 1960s onwards. This early law-and-economics movement borrowed economic tools that economics was able to supply at the time, i.e. substantially less advanced and more verbal than those of our time. As they strayed farther away from the straight homo economicus model, their analyses degenerated into loose speculations, to which economists and lawyers were no longer prepared to listen. In a brief concluding review of current law-and-economics, the author shows how utterly ignorant current scholars have shown themselves to be of this early scholarship and of the reasons for its decline. He implies that current law-and-economics may have been needlessly reinventing the wheel. One must wonder whether the current movement is headed for the same fate as the earlier one. Ejan Mackaay - Univ. of Montreal/Law 15 Nov. 1997