ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to illuminate early moment in the history of the economic analysis of law. In 1966, the American economic association and the association of American law schools established an ad hoc Joint Committee of professors to explore the prospects for increased interaction between lawyers and economists. The chapter focuses on the one major activity undertaken by joint committee: a 1969 conference centering on the question of whether products liability law could be usefully informed by the application of economic analysis to it. The products liability conference brought together a group of economists and legal scholars, to assess the utility of an economic approach to the subject and the possibilities of a more broad-based application of economic analysis to legal thinking. Legal scholars were importing every bit as much as economists were exporting, and they were making use of economic analysis in traditionally "non-economic" areas of law well before economists began their own forays.
