ABSTRACT
Fleming James’s work contained some economic insights. Other work in the era showed some appreciation of economic ideas, in particular the internalization of costs idea to appropriately set the marginal costs of an activity. But these were simple economic ideas. The University of Chicago Law School, and in the period shortly after, was highly entrepreneurial. The Antitrust Project was one of three major research efforts and, of the three, the least auspicious. The legal system was an additional example of a misguided public institution interfering with the market and private ordering. A few of the Project’s essays were written with an eye toward law reform; Robert Bork’s contributions are the principal examples. But there is no evidence in the work of the Project of Director’s interest in the law or in purely legal problems. The Law School had a long interest in social sciences: It had appointed the political scientist Ernst Freund to the faculty in 1892.
