ABSTRACT
The success of Law and Economics obscures, to some extent, a striking fact: The movement has virtually ignored criticisms of its foundations that are increasingly influential in mainstream economics, and by now commonplace in utilitarian philosophy. These criticisms are hardly new indeed, in philosophy most of them have been around since the fourth century BC, when Aristotle criticized Plato's ambitious attempt to propose a science of measurement dealing with ethical value. Law and Economics could be understood as involving simply a commitment to bring economics to bear upon law. So the project would involve no particular claims about the proper foundations for economics. A commitment to the commensurability of all an agent's ends runs very deep in the Law and Economics movement. The topic of endogenous preferences has received considerable discussion within the Law and Economics movement, and has by now become a major topic of the work of Gary Becker, one of the movement's mentors.
