ABSTRACT
Where the economic approach to the fields of constitutional law and administrative law is at stake, the situation in the United States is slightly different from that in the German-speaking sphere (and Europe in general): this is particularly striking with respect to ongoing research in these fields, where the USA is well ahead of the continent. This is surprising inasmuch as the joint consideration of legal and economic aspects of states has a very long tradition, in particular in the German-speaking sphere. In fact, the importance of (theoretical) economic analysis for the solution of legal problems was emphasized by outstanding scholars such as Joseph von Sonnenfels as early as the eighteenth century. Sonnenfels was the first professor of political economy at the law faculty of Vienna University and his two-volume textbook Police, Action and Finance (Administration, Markets and Financing) marks a first high point in the combination of economic and legal approaches to issues of society. This concern can be traced back to Kameralismus (cameralism, the specific German version of mercantilism) and continued in the provision of studies of Staatswissenschaft or political economics in most law schools, which strangely enough were abandoned only in the 1970s – at the time when the economic analysis of law gained momentum in the leading American law schools and the most prominent schools such as Yale Law School established such programmes as, for instance, that on ‘Law, economics and public policy’! This is not to say that in Europe there were no scholars at all, but a book such as the volume Öffentliches Recht als ein Gegenstand ökonomischer Forschung (Public Law as a subject of economic research) (Engel and Morlok, 1998) then really formed a landmark and clearly marked a turn in the perception of that field of research.
