ABSTRACT
O N E O F T H E D E F I N I N G F E AT U R E S of post-World War II economics is the application of neoclassical economic reasoning to areas traditionally considered non economic-political science, sociology, the law, and so onthe most successful of which is arguably the fi eld of law and economics. If one spends much time examining the current literature in the fi eld, including surveys of law and economics and its development, one comes away with the distinct impression that law and economics is a post-1960 phenomenon, dating roughly from the founding of the Journal of Law and Economics in the late 1950s and the publication of Ronald H. Coase’s “Problem of Social Cost” in 1960.l In fact, of course, law and economics, conceived of as the study of the interrelations between legal and economic processes, is as old as economics itself, as evidenced, for example, in the ancient Greek discussions of the regulatory environment in the ideal state and the Scholastic discussions of usury and pricing (undertaken in light of Roman civil law). Moving a bit more in the direction of the present, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Henry Sidgwick, the German historical school, A. C. Pigou, and, inter alia, the early American institutionalists devoted signifi cant attention to legal-economic relationships. Yet the existence of such work is noted only barely, if at all, in contemporary legal-economic scholarship, and, when noted, it is largely waved aside as something very different from (and irrelevant to) contemporary practice.
