Law in Contemporary Society

View   r4  >  r3  ...
DanielMargolskeeFirstPaper 4 - 20 Apr 2009 - Main.DanielMargolskee
Line: 1 to 1
 
META TOPICPARENT name="FirstPaper"
Line: 71 to 71
 Writing about the study of law, Justice Holmes predicted that, while “the blackletter man may be the man of the present, the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.” In the 1L curriculum, that prediction has proven only half-true. Formal economic analysis has come to dominate the teaching of Torts, Contracts, and Property, and yet, the curriculum falls short of Holmes’s aspirations for a “rational study of law.”
Changed:
<
<
Insights from economics are part of the “rational study of law” Holmes yearned for--but only a part. In privileging the methods of axiomatic economic analysis over the methods in other disciplines, the 1L curriculum fails to confront those unanswerable questions which, despite (or because of) their indeterminacy, were of paramount concern for Holmes: How does the law actually operate? What kind of society do we want to have? How can we change the law to bring about the society we would rather live in? How can a
>
>
Insights from economics are part of the “rational study of law” Holmes yearned for--but only a part. In privileging the methods of axiomatic economic analysis over the methods in other disciplines, the 1L curriculum fails to confront those unanswerable questions which, despite (or because of) their indeterminacy, were of paramount concern for Holmes: How does the law actually operate? What kind of society do we want to have? How can we change the law to bring about the society we would rather live in?
 

Economics as Part of a Rational Study of Law


Revision 4r4 - 20 Apr 2009 - 17:25:21 - DanielMargolskee
Revision 3r3 - 20 Apr 2009 - 02:55:18 - DanielMargolskee
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
Syndicate this site RSSATOM