ABSTRACT
No philosopher has claimed that the substance of such diverse areas of the law as crimes, torts, property, contracts, civil procedure, corporations, and family law could possibly derive from any one moral principle or set of consistent moral principles. Over the last several decades economists and lawyers trained in or enamored of economics have sought to explore the extent to which virtually all areas of the law could be understood as the institutional embodiment of the principle of economic efficiency. It is strange that economists do not find the claim that all of the law could derive from a single principle at all preposterous. Pareto superior policy changes increase net utility, thus obviating the interpersonal comparability problem of classical utilitarianism. Much of the economic analysis of law grows up around the line of argument presented in Ronald Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost.” A central difference between the Coasian and Pigouvian approaches to externalities concerns the role of the state.
