Economic Analysis of Law: A Book as a Workbench

Abstract

In this paper, we attempt to sketch out the roles that the book Economic Analysis of Law has played in the community of law and economics, and beyond, including an idiosyncratic use that we believe its author has made of it. Perhaps the most significant contribution of the book is its impact on academic scholarship and practice. However, alongside its public and more visible life, the book likely also played a more intimate yet crucial role in Posner's scholarship, serving as a workbench in which ideas could be conceived and developed through a dialectal process with other publications. In this respect, the pages of the book have provided an important tool through which Posner developed his scholarship. In particular, we focus on the construction of the iudex oeconomicus paradigm. Some forty years after public choice, this notion finally filled a gap in the economics discipline, that of failing to treat judges as economic agents, just like anybody else. This lengthy journey had the merit of making judges the same as ordinary people. The multifold nature of the book, with the many roles it has played for the scientific community and for the author himself, reconfirms it as a unique resource for law and economics.

Keywords: Posner, economics analysis of law, judicial decision making, judges, iudex oeconomicus