This paper explores the reception of Ronald Coase's article, "The Problem of Social Cost," over the period 1961-1965. Though this article came to be most closely identified with the idea now known as the 'Coase theorem,' the focus of the early reactions to, and use made of, Coase's analysis was...

This paper examines the diffusion of Coase’s negotiation result -- now better known as the 'Coase theorem' -- in the legal literature during the 1960s, with particular attention paid to the challenge that this result posed for received legal thinking, how the it related to far older attempts...

Guido Calabresi's scholarly career has intersected the Coase theorem at several points — from an early primitive formulation of an idea similar to that elaborated by Coase in Calabresi's pioneering 1961 paper presenting an economic analysis of tort law to applications of the theorem in...

Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian analysis of crime and punishment is regularly characterized as an inspiration for the economic analysis of law, whereas Henry Sidgwick has been all but ignored in the discussions of the history of law and economics. Sidgwick is well known as the godfather of...

Robbins's Essay was significant in many ways, but especially in giving economics a definition that came to dominate the professional literature. Our goal in the present paper is to trace the reception of Robbins's definition of economics as, to use a useful abbreviation, the science of scarcity....

The theory of government failure was developed as a reaction against Pigovian welfare economics and the Cambridge approach to economic policy analysis generally, which ostensibly lacked a theory of governmental behavior. We argue that the Cambridge tradition — as reflected in the writings of...

This is the first chapter of the revised edition of our book, Economics and the Law: From Posner to Postmodernism and Beyond (Princeton University Press, forthcoming August 2006). In this chapter we introduce the reader to the field of Law and Economics by defining the field broadly and...

In spite of the efforts made over the past several decades to bring to the fore the important contributions of the Italian public finance tradition - La Scienza delle finanze - this body of analysis remains relatively unknown outside of Italy. The same cannot be said of the seminal work of Knut...

This paper, prepared for The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School, gives an overview of the evolution of the Chicago school of law and economics from the 1930s onward, tracing both the evolution of theory (including the move from "law and economics" to "economic analysis of law") and the rise...

Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian analysis of crime and punishment is regularly characterized as an inspiration for the economic analysis of law, whereas Henry Sidgwick has been all but ignored in the discussions of the history of law and economics. Sidgwick is well known as the godfather of...