ABSTRACT
“LAW AND ECONOMICS” is certainly not a modern invention. On the contrary, as Steve Medema notes, “law and economics is as old as economics itself” (1998). As Medema explains, from the first Greek philosophers to the early American Institutionalists, in passing by, among others, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx and Henry Sidgwick, many were those economists who were convinced that their discipline could be practised only by taking institutions, in general, and legal rules, in particular, into consideration. They were all political economists, that is they believed that economic activities are embedded in social and legal structures; and, for some of them, reciprocally, that legal phenomena have economic aspects. As a consequence, any economic analyses necessarily have a legal dimension; the economic concepts are defined as legal concepts (for instance, the price of a good or its value are grounded in property rights). Or, legal analyses rest on economic concepts. Therefore, many of the economic contributions developed since the origins of economics can also be viewed as contributions to law and economics. It would therefore be too complicated and too difficult to list all those economic analyses that have a legal flavor.
