ABSTRACT
Law and economics are complementary disciplines due to their joint use in business. Nevertheless, the relationship creates certain difficulties because of the mismatch between the disciplines’ epistemologies. Consequently, the application of economics to law produces some oversimplification and misunderstanding, causing some challenges for practitioners. This chapter discusses how most of the difficulties of interaction between economics and law reside in the categories adopted in the theorization of economic choice, and epistemological difficulties are due to the static approach of economics. More specifically, economics has difficulty in considering the cognitive role of norms and the interdependencies between rights, rules and the institutional context. The specific case of the noncomparable conceptions of property rights is discussed, highlighting the deficiencies of categorization in both economics and law and revealing the actuality of some historical conceptions.
