ABSTRACT
Commercial battles have been shifting from the showrooms to the lawcourts, as the property rights in which people trade grow more complex to define and assign, and the contracts they must sign get correspondingly more complicated. Economists are in demand on the expert witness stand to identify restraints or renegations of trade, and quantify their costs. But the law must make its own market, and stands accused in many countries of using the thinness of that market to price its own services far above cost. The cost to traders of going to law runs wider than mere legal bills, and leads to economy in the use of law even as economics tried to enter the use of lawyers.
