pt. 1. From old to new law and economics -- pt. 2. Towards an economic analysis of law -- pt. 3. The economics of the emergence and establishment of norms and customs -- pt. 4. The economics of legal systems -- pt. 5. The economics of judicial decision making -- pt. 6. Efficiency of the common...

Born on December 29 1910 at Willesden (in a suburb northwest of London, UK), Ronald Harry Coase died on September 2, 2013 in Chicago (USA). He had lived a long 102 years, of which almost 50 spent in the USA, where he had migrated in the early 1950s and of which 80 were devoted to the...

In spite of the clear objective assigned to the integration process in the 1950s, the institutional status of the European Union remains ambiguous and uneasy to define. The argument that we present in this article is that Europe has always hesitated between two forms of federalism. We use an...

In this paper, we show that, in 1961 and before he had read "The Problem of Social Cost", Calabresi reached exactly the same conclusions as the one reached by Coase and summarized by Stigler as the "Coase theorem" but he believed that this result was valid only in the theoretical world of the...

Market failures, which are usually viewed as a consequence of self-interest, are also supposed to be a major justification for coercive state interventions. This was the view of, among others, Richard Musgrave and Paul Samuelson, but not of James Buchanan. The latter certainly admitted that...

Meir Kohn's Exchange and Value claims that economics can be characterised around two opposed paradigms, the exchange and the value paradigms. In this paper, we apply this dichotomy to characterise the analyses proposed by economists in the field known as "law and economics". We compare and...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse David Hume's model of man. We show that three major elements characterise his representation of man: first the weaknesses and limitations of human rationality; second, the psychological foundations of human behaviour, with a particular focus on the role of...

Law and Economics deals with the economic analysis of legal relations, legal provisions, laws and regulations and is a research field which has a long tradition in economics. It was lost after the expulsion of some of the leading economists from Germany during 1933 to 1938, but then revived in...