This paper proposes and compares different characterization of what an economic expert is — his/her role, functions and legitimacy — according to different conceptions of economics: welfarism, libertarian paternalism and positive political economy. We show that both welfarism and libertarian...

James M. Buchanan received the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on public choice theory. Indeed, Buchanan was one of the first who proposed to use economics to analyze political and constitutional phenomena. But Buchanan was not only interested in public choice, constitutional...

How do economists defme democracy? Such is the question this paper tries to deal with. We contrast two economists' views on democracy. First, we show how, within the framework of public choice theory, the use of the tools and methodology of mainstream economic analysis, the focus put upon...

The thesis that judges could (voluntarily or not) promote efficiency through their decisions has largely been discussed since Posner put it forward in the early 1970s. There nonetheless remains a methodological aspect that has never (to our knowledge) been analyzed and that we address in this...

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...