Abstract
Since the seminal article on social cost was published by Ronald Coase in the 1960 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics,1 tremendous strides have been made in legal scholarship incorporating economics and, in particular, in relating legal institutions to the pattern of resource allocation in the advanced economies. US legal scholars and economists have given the lead in this development, but Britain is now following hard on their heels not least via the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Wolfson College, Oxford. Economists have been appointed to tenured positions in many US law schools and even in a few British law schools and research centres specializing in law and economics have been established, for example, at Chicago, Emory, Columbia, Miami, Pennsylvania, and University College, London. Leading textbooks by Posner2 and Hirsch3 have been published in law and economics and several innovative specialist journals have achieved academic and commercial success.4 Moreover, conventional law journals now publish articles which contain substantial inputs of economics.5 In many ways, this developing interest in law and economics has signalled the emergence of a new institutional economics which has led the subject back from the wilderness of abstract theory and from the more extreme applications of positivist econometrics.
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Notes
R. H. Coase, ‘The Problem of Social Cost’, Journal of Law and Economics, vol. III October 1960, pp. 1–44.
R. A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law (Boston, Mass: Little, Brown, 1972).
W. Hirsch, Law and Economics: An Introductory Analysis (London: Academic Press, 1979).
J. M. Buchanan and G. Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965).
A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).
See also C. K. Rowley, ‘Social Sciences and Law: The Relevance of Economic Theories’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, Winter 1981, pp. 391–405.
C. G. Veljanovski, The New Law-and-Economics (Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford, 1982).
See K. R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
See W. J. Samuels and N. Mercuro, Posnerian Law and Economics on the Bench; and R. A. Posner, ‘Wealth Maximization and Judicial Decision-Making’ in International Review of Law and Economics, vol. 4, no. 2, December 1984.
P. Burrows, The Economic Theory of Pollution Control (London: Martin Robertson, 1979).
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1973).
J. M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty (Chicago UP, 1975).
J. M. Enelow and M. J. Hinich, The Spatial Theory of Voting (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
See also C. K. Rowley, ‘The Relevance of the Median Voter Theorem’, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, March 1984.
M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard University Press, 1965).
M. Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (Yale University Press, 1982).
See J. M. Buchanan, R. D. Tollison and G. Tullock (eds), Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society (Texas A & M, 1980).
W. A. Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine, 1971).
A. Breton, The Economic Theory of Representative Government (London: Macmillan, 1974).
C. K. Rowley and R. Elgin, ‘Towards a Theory of Bureaucracy’, in G. K. Shaw (ed.), Public Choice, Public Finance and Public Policy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1985 (forthcoming)).
G. Brennan and J. M. Buchanan, The Reason of Rules (Cambridge University Press 1985 (forthcoming)).
For a more detailed analysis see C. K. Rowley, ‘Towards A Political Economy of British Labor Laws’, University of Chicago Law Review, Autumn 1984.
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© 1985 The British Association for the Advancement of Science
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Rowley, C. (1985). The Relationship between Economics, Politics and the Law in the Formation of Public Policy. In: Matthews, R.C.O. (eds) Economy and Democracy. British Association for the Advancement of Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17970-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17970-1_5
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