ABSTRACT

Start with an example, taken from a book with which I largely agree, the first edition of Richard Posner's Economic Analysis of Law:

Our survey of the major common law fields suggests that the common law exhibits a deep unity that is economic in character. . . . The common law method is to allocate responsibilities between people engaged in interacting activities in such a way as to maximize the joint value . . . of the activities . . . . [T]he judge can hardly fail to consider whether the loss was the product of wasteful, uneconomical resource use. In a culture of scarcity, this is an urgent, an inescapable question.