The law concerning the reproduction of works of art is unambiguous: the owner of the physical item does not own the right to copy and reproduce it. The copyright or right to reproduce a work of art either belongs to the artist and his/her heirs, or to everybody when the work is in the public...

Although Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations is often cited as marking the birth of economics, it was really not until after the second world war that economics became the distinctive, more or less unified, and largely separate discipline summarised in the textbooks of today. Even a mere...

The economic analysis of law mostly relies on the assumption of self-interested agents. Until the early 1970s, it is little concerned with the issues of rescue and helping. Now, an economic analysis of rescue laws appears with the works of Landes and Posner (1978). We show that the emergence and...

Meir Kohn's Exchange and Value claims that economics can be characterised around two opposed paradigms, the exchange and the value paradigms. In this paper, we apply this dichotomy to characterise the analyses proposed by economists in the field known as "law and economics". We compare and...

In spite of the clear objective assigned to the integration process in the 1950s, the institutional status of the European Union remains ambiguous and uneasy to define. The argument that we present in this article is that Europe has always hesitated between two forms of federalism. We use an...

This essay reviews Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, which triggered a huge controversy that virally spread on the internet and in various journals. We will evaluate MacLean’s almost biographical account of James...

Market failures, which are usually viewed as a consequence of self-interest, are also supposed to be a major justification for coercive state interventions. This was the view of, among others, Richard Musgrave and Paul Samuelson, but not of James Buchanan. The latter certainly admitted that...

Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) has been incredibly influential generally and within economics, and it remains important despite some historical and conceptual flaws. Hardin focused on the stress population growth inevitably placed on environmental resources....

Written by James Buchanan in the early 1970s, “The Samaritan's Dilemma” is a pessimistic essay, marked by his author's negative views about the situation in Western societies at that time. Yet, the situation described in this essay also fits into Buchanan’s approach of cooperation and...