On the Receipt of the Ronald H. Coase Medal: Uncertainty, the Economic Crisis, and the Future of Law and Economics

This paper discusses problems in economic analysis of law arising from the increased specialization of academic practitioners of this subfield of economics, which takes as its subject a uniquely fluid, contestable, and inveterately normative subject—namely, the law. As a result of the limited acquaintance of most economic analysts of law with macroeconomic theory (owing to their specialization in relevant fields of microeconomics), they have (with important exceptions, however) had trouble contributing to the understanding of the recent financial crisis. The crisis underscores the importance, across a range of issues including financial and antitrust law, of the economics of uncertainty (in the Knight-Keynes sense) and organization economics. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.