Law and Economics as Interdisciplinary Exchange: Philosophical, Methodological and Historical Perspectives

Law and Economics is an established field of research and arguably one of the few examples of a successful interdisciplinary project. This book explores whether, or to what extent, that interdisciplinarity has indeed been a success. It provides insights on the foundations and methods, achievements and challenges of Law and Economics, at a time when both the continuing criticism of academic economics and the growth of empirical legal studies raise questions about the identity and possible further developments of the project.

Through a combination of reflections on long-term trends and detailed case studies, contributors to this volume analyse the institutional and epistemic character of Law and Economics, which develops through an exchange of concepts, models and practices between economics and legal scholarship. Inspired by insights from the philosophy of the social sciences, the book shows how concepts travel between legal scholarship and economics and change meanings when applied elsewhere, how economic theories and models inform, and transform, judicial practice, and it addresses whether the transfers of knowledge between economics and law are symmetrical exchanges between the two disciplines.

Péter Cserne , PhD, is Associate Professor in Law at the University of Northumbria, UK, and extramural fellow of Tilburg Law and Economics Centre (TILEC). He has held visiting positions at Columbia, Oxford and Toronto Universities and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Private Law in Hamburg. A lawyer and economist by training, he has published widely on legal theory, economic analysis of law and contracts. He is the founder and convener of MetaLawEcon, an international academic network for research on the foundations of economic analysis of law.

Magdalena Malecka , PhD, is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow (University of Helsinki and Stanford University). Her Marie Curie project is a philosophical analysis of the applications of the behavioral sciences to policy. Before starting the Marie Curie Fellowship, Magdalena was a postdoctoral researcher at TINT Centre for Philosophy of Social Science (University of Helsinki) and a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. While remaining affiliated with TINT, in February 2018 she joined the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Central European University in Budapest for five months as a Junior Core Fellow.