Considering Law and Macroeconomics

Abstract

The worst financial and economic crisis to hit the world’s richest economies since the Great Depression inspired a flood of scholarship that straddled the disciplines of law and macroeconomics. With few exceptions, this crisis scholarship did not set out to build a new interdisciplinary movement and did not claim the legacy of earlier efforts to mine the intersection of law and macroeconomics. What are we to make of this moment ten years on? Could Law and Macroeconomics (#LawMacro for short) be an important new turn in legal and economic thought, a casual interdisciplinary tryst on the margins of a hundred-year flood, or, paraphrasing one commentator, this generation’s Freudian pushback against the venerable Law and Economics movement? This symposium issue of Law and Contemporary Problems offers a sampling of views from a September 2019 conference at Georgetown Law on the prospects for LawMacro as a field of inquiry. Our principal goal for the Conference and this Issue has been to consider the scope for more systematic, sustained engagement between law and macroeconomics, distilling post-crisis research trends, and identifying avenues for future collaboration.

Keywords: macroeconomics, political economy, financial stability, financial crisis, regulation, countercyclical regulation

JEL Classification: E1, E3, E4, E6, K1, K2, K3, K4