ABSTRACT
Thomas Kuhn’s views on the nature and development of science, as presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, are referred to in the Law and Economics literature arguably more often than any other position from the twentieth-century philosophy of science. In this chapter, it will be argued that Law and Economics scholars usually employ the Kuhnian framework in one of two contexts. First, the Kuhnian framework is used to justify the scientific status of Law and Economics. Second, the concept of scientific revolution (paradigm shift) is assumed to provide a nice interpretive tool to describe both the advent of Law and Economics and the subsequent developments of the field. The existing attempts to fruitfully apply the Kuhnian framework to the reflection on Law and Economics fail in both contexts, for at least two reasons. First, they are based on a rather superficial reading of Structure and flawed understanding of the Kuhnian notion of paradigm. Second, even if interpreted in a more thorough way, the Kuhnian framework is probably too weak a tool to achieve the goals mentioned earlier. Thus, it will be argued that Law and Economics scholars have used it rather for rhetorical purpose, failing to deliver scholarly, interesting or illuminative results.
