ABSTRACT
This chapter depicts the broad foundations of socioeconomics. It is presented in the belief that this new paradigm would prove more useful than the existing models that describe and analyze the law. The chapter has three parts. The first part outlines the reasons the time has come to develop a shared disciplinary core for socioeconomics. It then turns to the principles that ought to guide us in developing such a core, and it suggests several specific elements needed for such a discipline. Law and economics, seen as a composite discipline that now command the loyalty of a third of the legal scholars in the United States, based on the neoclassical model. To develop the said shared socioeconomic core, there are two fundamentally different paradigms, of social science, which in turn have deep connections to distinct bodies of social philosophies, ethics, social values, and even political ideologies.
