Law and Economics

by Robert Cooter, Thomas Ulen, Thomas Cooter, Robert; Ulen

Book Overview

Law and economics has become a central course in U.S. legal education and for students majoring in topics like economics, political science, and philosophy. Cooter and Ulen provide a clear... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201770253
• ISBN13: 9780201770254
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Addison Wesley Longman
• Length: 533 Pages
• Weight: 2.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.8" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Expensive, but a good investment

This is a nice textbook. If you're looking for a good introduction to the field of law and economics intermediate between Mercuro/Medema's _Economics and the Law_ (low brainstrain) and Thomas Miceli's _Economics of the Law_ (high brainstrain), this one is a good choice.One of the things I especially like about Cooter and Ulen's approach is that they are careful _not_ to reduce law to economics (or vice versa, for that matter). Their claim is simply that law and economics have a lot to learn from one another. And this claim is hard to argue with, no matter what other criticisms I might make about some parts of the law-and-economics movement.For example, people who work with the law may tend to think of law as a means (solely) of securing justice, unaware that law also provides a complex structure of what economists would call "incentives" which promote what economists would call "efficiency". On the other hand, economists may tend to take for granted the existence of such institutions as property rights and contracts, and the meaning of such terms as "voluntary." These things are not as simple as they appear (as any first-year law student could tell you, although lots of "pop libertarians" probably couldn't), and legal scholarship has developed a lot of machinery for dealing with them.So this textbook, after a short opening chapter, devotes two not-overlong and altogether mainstream summary-and-overview chapters to, respectively, microeconomic theory and law. This means that a reader from either discipline can learn the basics of the other before proceeding to the meat of the analysis.Then the real work starts. Cooter and Ulen do a thorough job of presenting, in a readable and accessible manner, the basics of the economic analysis of the law of property, torts, contracts, legal procedure, crime, and all the other neat stuff on which the law-and-economics movement has based its reputation -- i.e., the application of economic theory to the study of law beyond the traditional bounds of, e.g., antitrust and other areas of law directly concerned with economics.It's designed to be eminently readable. Judgments like the one I'm about to render are notoriously subjective, but overall, the text strikes me as a good mix of clear expository prose, a well-chosen range of helpful examples, sound theory, and audience-appropriate mathematics (algebra and graphing). More advanced texts -- e.g. the aforementioned Miceli, and _Introduction to Law and Economics by A. Mitchell Polinsky -- are harder to read than this one unless you've got some math background. (Polinsky doesn't actually _use_ all that much math, but I think readers without some mathematical experience will find his book more difficult reading than this one.)References abound; every chapter closes with at least a handful of them. So the text also doubles as a bibliography and introduction to what is rapidly becoming a vast literature.If you're introducing yourself to the field, this book is a good inv

A Great Book On A Great Topic

Originally, I bought this for a class in college and it remains one of the few texts that I kept. I was studying economics and had always imagined that I would go to law school some day so I took this class. The result was I went back sooner and fell in love with concept of looking at law through an economic lens. To this day, I will pull this book down from the shelf to rethink about a question using the tools this book provides.The best part about this book is that is not overly complex or attempting to over simplify. Rather, its beauty is found in Cooter & Ulen's use of a well-timed example, beautifully simple diagrams, and realizing that this book is only an introduction to a controversial and complex subject matter. If you want to read Judge Posner's treatise I highly recommend it, but if you want to begin to understand why Posner and those like myself argue for this type of analysis-start here. This book is expensive, but I would buy it again. If you're even remotely interested in this beautiful hybrid of human though, I strongly recommend you buy this. If you have to buy it for a class as I did, I would hold on to it and read it again without an eye toward the exam. I know it will be a good beer resale at the end of the semester, but I think in the long-run you'll be glad you kept it.

Excellent introduction to an important area

There are a number of good introductory works to law and economics. Richard Posner's Economic Analysis of the Law, for example, is a widely used and heavily-cited text. Yet, Cooter and Ulen have produced a text that deserves a top ranking in this growing field.Law and economics is a school of jurisprudence in which the tools of microeconomic analysis are used to study law. Those lawyers, judges, and legal scholars who practice economic analysis have a deceptively simple task. They translate some legal doctrine into economic terms. They then apply a few basic tools of neoclassical microeconomics, such as cost-benefit analysis, collective action theory, decisionmaking under uncertainty, and risk aversion, to the problem. Finally, they translate the result back into legal terms.Law and economics radically transformed legal thinking. Traditional forms of legal scholarship were mostly backward-looking. One reasoned from old precedents to decide a present case, seemingly without much concern (at least explicitly) for the effect today's decision would have on future behavior. Yet, law is necessarily forward-looking. To be sure, a major function of our legal system is to resolve present disputes, but law's principal function is to regulate future behavior. The law and economics movement succeeded because it recognized that judges cannot administer justice solely retrospectively. They must also consider what rules their decisions will create to guide the behavior of other actors in the future. The genius of law and economics was giving judges a systematic mechanism for predicting how rules will affect behavior. Cooter and Ulen demonstrate this by applying basic economic principles across a wide array of both common law and statutory areas. They tackles topics in such diverse areas as property, torts, contracts, and criminal law. In effect, they provide an economic analysis of the first year of law school.Cooter and Ulen recognize that it is important to distinguish between positive and normative uses of economic analysis. At the risk of being too simplistic, positive law and economics asks whether the law is efficient; normative law and economics commands that the law ought to be efficient. The point of positive economic analysis of law is to determine how people are likely to behave under a given legal regime. In trying to make behavioral predictions, positive law and economics does nothing more than to apply modern microeconomic tools to legal rules. The utility of positive economic analysis should be obvious. Economics is generally quite good at predicting how people respond to changes in prices. If we think of legal sanctions as the cost of engaging in certain activities, changing a legal rule is no different than any other change in prices. The former is just as subject to analysis under price theory and game theory as the latter. Imposing a more onerous legal sanction on the use of illegal drugs, for example, is the functional equivalent of chargi

An outstanding introduction for members of both fields

I must strongly disagree with my fellow San Franciscan- Cooter and Ulin have written one of the truly great works in the field of legal economics. This book does an excellent job of teaching the main ideas of legal economics without drowning the reader in text and formulae. If additional information is desired the reader is given a number of citations and recommended texts for further study. Readers with experience in both of these technical fields are likely to find this book to be an exciting vindication of their previous studies.

An Intelligent Introduction to Law and Economics

Cooter and Ulen have completed the second edition of an important text in law and economics. The style is reader friendly and not heavily technical: a good attribute for an introductory text. The book is original in its presentation of the subject matter and rich with valuable intuitions for both educated economists and lawyers interested in the field.