The economic analysis of law mostly relies on the assumption of self-interested agents. Until the early 1970s, it is little concerned with the issues of rescue and helping. Now, an economic analysis of rescue laws appears with the works of Landes and Posner (1978). We show that the emergence and...

Written by James Buchanan in the early 1970s, “The Samaritan's Dilemma” is a pessimistic essay, marked by his author's negative views about the situation in Western societies at that time. Yet, the situation described in this essay also fits into Buchanan’s approach of cooperation and...

In a recent article, William Darity, M’Balou Camara, and Nancy MacLean (2023) argue that economist W.H. Hutt was a white supremacist. In the course of their analysis, Darity et al. refer to a claim Hutt made about “exclusive clubs”, that they link to James Buchanan’s article on clubs...