This article demonstrates that our more sophisticated theories of law lead us to a point where we are no longer able to distinguish law from culture, or society, or the market, or politics or anything of the sort. Not only are the various terms inextricably intertwined (something that other...

Before the ethical dreams and political ambitions of law can even be articulated, let alone realized, the aesthetics of law have already shaped the medium within which those projects will have to do their work. This work attempts to retrieve and expose those recurrent forms that shape the...

This article takes the pathbreaking Coasen arguments against Pigou and turns them against "the market-based transaction cost" approach favored by Judge Posner and other Chicago-style microeconomists. The concept of transaction costs does not have the sort of theoretical intelligibility nor the...

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s 1913 article, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, is widely viewed as brilliant. A thrilling read, it is not. More like chewing on sawdust. The arguments are dense, the examples unfriendly, and the prose turgid. “How to Do Things With...

Contemporary legal thought can aim at a variety of different objectives: explanation, understanding, interpretation, edification, elucidation, observation, critique, narrative, norm-selection, norm-justification, political action — any of these and more, including all manner of hybrids. Amidst...

In Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler describe how public and private institutions can improve on individual choices by nudging individuals into making selections that are right for them. Rejecting the Econ-101 caricature of the rational utility maximizer as inaccurate, Sunstein and Thaler...

Legal doctrine is the currency of contemporary law. Yet while law students, lawyers, and judges take the substance of specific doctrines seriously, the idea of doctrine itself (what it is, how it means, what it does) is routinely bypassed and thus left unexplored. How to Do Things with Legal...

This essay begins on one of those cold wet April Cambridge mornings. It was too wet for fog, but too indifferent for rain. My head ached. My lips were dry and my tongue felt bloated. The fever had surely come back. Worse - the laudanum was wearing off. Tonight would be dinner at Langdell's. It...

In law as well as economics, the most well-known aspect of Coase's “The Problem of Social Cost,” is the Coase Theorem. Over the decades, that particular notion has morphed into a crucial component of Chicago law and economics — namely, transaction cost analysis. In this Article, I...

This brief essay sketches the ways in which four leading economic thinkers (Knight, Coase, Posner and Sunstein) have dealt with a vexing tension in the relations of economics to law, the state, and the social. The tension arises as microeconomists address (or fail to address) the relations of...