ABSTRACT
9 The economic analysis of law has provided a fertile field for the cultivation of publications primarily by microeconomic theorists with little or no knowledge of the law, it seems. In 1978, Charles Fried produced a logical analysis of law based upon a different First Principle because of his “dissatisfaction with the account of legal rights becoming increasingly popular in the field of economics and law”. John R. Commons was a reformer who sought to “save capitalism” and, in the course of drafting his many reform proposals for legislative enactment, he found that he had to study court decisions if the new laws he proposed were to be held constitutional by the courts. In 1934 Commons wrote, “The problem now is not to create a different kind of economics—‘institutional economics’ divorced from preceding schools—but to give to collective action, in all its varieties, its due place in economic theory”.
