This Essay explores the relationship between normative law and economics and legal theory. We claim that legal theory must account for law's coerciveness, its normativity, and its institutional structure. Economic analyses that engage these features are an integral part of legal theory, rather...

Many private law scholars strive to divine broad unified normative theories of property, contracts, torts, and restitution (or, at times, even of private law as a whole). These monist accounts suggest that one regulative principle guides the various doctrines of these complex legal fields or...