1st Edition

Law and Economics Alternative Economic Approaches to Legal and Regulatory Issues

    The economic analysis of legal and regulatory issues need not be limited to the neoclassical economic approach. The expert contributors to this work employ a variety of heterodox legal-economic theories to address a broad range of legal issues. They demonstrate how these various approaches can lead to very different conclusions concerning the role of the law and legal intervention in a wide array of contexts. The schools of thought and methodologies represented here include institutional economics, new institutional economics, socio-economics, social economics, behavioral economics, game theory, feminist economics, Rawlsian economics, radical economics, Austrian economics, and personalist economics. The legal and regulatory issues examined include anti-trust and competition, corporate governance, the environment and natural resources, land use and property rights, unions and collective bargaining, welfare benefits, work-time regulation and standards, sexual harassment in the workplace, obligations of employers and employees to each other, crime, torts, and even the structure of government. Each contributor brings a different emphasis and provides thoughtful, sometimes provocative analysis and conclusions. Together, these heterodox insights will provide valuable supplementary reading for courses in law and economics as well as public policy and business courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

    Preface, Warren J. Samuels; Part I. Introduction: New Approaches to Law and Economics; 1. Law and Economics: Making the Case for a Broader Approach, Margaret Oppenheimer and Nicholas Mercuro; 2. The Foundations of Socio-Economics and Its Relation to Law, Amitai Etzioni; Part II. Legal Issues Concerning Firms and Market Structure; 3. The Inadequacy of Competition Policies: A New-Institutional Approach, Claude Menard; 4. The Market Path to Liberation: Feminism, Economics, and Corporate Law, Kellye Y. Testy; 5. Alternative Economic Approaches to Antitrust Enforcement, Patrick J. Welch and Thomas L. Greaney; Part IV. Legal Issues Concerning Natural Resources, the Environment, and Land Use; 6. A Comparative Institutional Approach to Law and Economics: Theory and Environmental, Natural Resource, and Land-Use Applications, Nicholas Mercuro; 7. Property and Politics in the Hudson Valley: Continuity and Change in the Corporate Form, Ann Davis; 8. Prior Questions: Endogenous Property Rights in Economics and the Case of the Radio Spectrum, Elizabeth Kruse; Part V. Legal Issues Concerning Labor, Employment, and Unemployment; 9. An Alternative Economic Analysis of the Regulation of Unions and Collective Bargaining, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt; 10. Personalist Economics, Justice, and the Law: Applications to Labor, Product and Credit Markets, Edward J. O'Boyle; 11. The Efficiency and Employment Enhancing Effects of Social Welfare, Morris Altman; 12. Alternative Economic Approaches to Analyzing Hours of Work Determination and Standards, Morris Altman and Lonnie Golden; 13. Efficient but Not Equitable: The Problem with Using the Law and Economics Paradigm to Interpret Sexual Harassment in the Work Place, Toni Lester; Part VI. Other Legal Issues; 14. A Social Economics of Crime (Based on Kantian Ethics), Mark D. White; 15. Economic Analysis of Tort Law: Austrian and Kantian Perspectives, Edward Stringham and Mark D. White; 16. Institutional Change and Economic Growth in Spain Since Democratic Transition in 1978: Regulating Multilevel Governance as a Key Factor, Fernando Tobos

    Biography

    Margaret Oppenheimer, Nicholas Mercuro