Introduction to Economic Analysis of Law (AED) Part II
the main contributions that the AED making the economy were made by the so-called institutional economics. The main theorists of the discipline in its various phases were:
* John R. COMMONS (1862-1945).
Commons was a key member of the American institutionalism school. Born in Ohio (USA), was professor of economics at the universities of Wesleyan, Oberlin, Indiana, Syracuse and Wisconsin. President of the American Economic Association.
His influence is not so much to his theoretical writings as legislation that promoted and managed to pass in American legislatures. His friendship with Robert LaFollette and other progressive senators prompted a profound reform of labor legislation, especially concerning health and safety conditions in the workplace, unemployment insurance and social security programs for retirement. All this before the First World War!
John Commons investigated the role of the state and proposed the development of “Institutional Economics” as a synthesis of Political Economy, Law and Ethics.
* Kenneth J. ARROW (1921 – ).
Nobel Prize 1972. U.S. economist, New York, studied at City College and Columbia. His doctoral thesis “Social Choice and Individual Values” was a theoretical revolution. Using the notation of symbolic logic raised the problem of intransitivity of social preferences. The “impossibility theorem of Arrow,” argues that there is a democratic form of voting that allows a transitive social choice and rational. The only constitution which would allow decisions stable and unambiguous a dictatorship would be the individual or where the choice down to two.
He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1972, shared with Britain’s John R. Hicks, for pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory.
* Ronald H. Coase (1910 – ).
Nobel Prize 1991. British economist won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991 for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy. It is considered the originator of the field of Economic Analysis study of law with its publication in 1960 of what has been called the Coase Theorem.
He studied at the London School of Economics and began working as a professor at the Dundee School of Economics and Commerce (1932-1934), the University of Liverpool (1934 -1935) and the London School of Economics (1935-1939 and 1946 -1951). He immigrated to the United States, working at the University of Buffalo, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia and since 1964, the University of Chicago. He was editor of the magazine “Law and Economics” from 1964 to 1982.
The 1960 article “The Problem of Social Cost” is considered the most cited article in the economic literature of all times and countries, but their ideas were seminal and explicit in the article “The Nature of the Firm”, 1937, that any pricing system has a cost and that it is possible to do an economic analysis of the rules, organizational forms and methods of payment.
Ronald Coase is considered the founder of the Economic Analysis of Law and the “New Institutional Economics.”
Possibly Related Articles:
Posted in Law | 
Tags: Civil courts, Court Management, Economic Analysis of Law, Federal Judiciary Council