MetaLawEcon

When a discipline grows and gets well-established, many researchers tend to think that its foundational problems have been solved. This misperception is related to the fact that researchers often do not bother themselves with meta-level problems of their scholarship. For good or bad, they “just do it”, without much reflection on what they are doing. Although methodological self-reflection is not a panacea and rarely a full-time job, time to time it is useful to look at one’s work in a more abstract way.

Law and economics scholars are no exception. Sixty years after Coase’s The problem of social cost, Law and Economics seems to have become the lingua franca of US legal scholarship. Compared to the 1970s and 1980s, the discipline has become more pluralistic in its methods, more self-critical about its normative assumptions, assertions and ambitions, and it is increasingly popular in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

Still, the interdisciplinary character of law and economics research raises further questions about the possibilities and limits of intellectual integration. While economists are more or less aware of the foundational problems of economic theory, they are rarely confronted with jurisprudential concerns. Lawyers who are working on doctrinal or policy problems are often confused about what to expect from economics. Finally, jurisprudential critiques of law and economics often have a straw man as their target.

These considerations inspired the launch of MetaLawEcon, to unite forces on research on the foundations of law and economics.