ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the evolution of the figure of the judge over the fifty years of existence of the law-and-economics movement, by exploring a range of paradoxes, starting with the fact that in the neoclassical EAL, judicial action is reduced to a strictly economic function and that, to be working, the theory has, at least in its basic version, adopted assumptions about judges's knowledge and motivations that stand in sharp contradiction not only with judicial reality but, most of all, with its own conception of human rationality as self-interested behavior. The first section describes how in mainstream law and economics, since the beginning, the judge has been a central and, at the same time, absent microeconomic model which, in spite of its assumes lack of realism, has clearly established normative pretensions. The second part focuses on the recent behavioral amendments in law-and-economics that import analytical tools from cognitive psychology in order to reconsider the rationality of the model's actor.
