Law in Contemporary Society

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Economics in the 1L Curriculum

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The lawyer of the present is the master of economics, at least in the 1L classroom. Tort class is an extended meditation on Calabresi’s The Cost of Accidents (1970); Contract law is reconceived as a quest for transaction-cost minimizing default rules in the footsteps of Coase’s The Problem of Social Cost (1960); Property law is taught and learned in the shadow of Calabresi and Melamed’s Property Rules, Liability Rules and Inalienability (1970).
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The lawyer of the present is the master of economics, at least in the 1L classroom. Tort class is an extended meditation on Calabresi’s The Cost of Accidents (1970); Contract law is reconceived as a quest for transaction-cost minimizing default rules in the footsteps of Coase’s The Problem of Social Cost (1960); Property law is taught and learned in the shadow of Calabresi and Melamed’s Property Rules, Liability Rules and Inalienability (1970).
 To be sure, there are moments of great resonance between Holmes’s Path of the Law and the law-and-economics essays on which so much of the curriculum is now based. Implicit in Holmes’s observation that “the duty to keep a contract at common law means a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it” is a distinction between rights enforced by liability rules and those enforced by property rules. Holmes is keenly aware that some number of accidents are too costly to avoid in modern life; that compensating injured workers can be recast as “the public … insur[ing] the safety of one whose work it uses”; even that the value, in economic terms, “of a life to the community can be estimated.”

Revision 5r5 - 21 Apr 2009 - 03:47:37 - DanielMargolskee
Revision 4r4 - 20 Apr 2009 - 17:25:21 - DanielMargolskee
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