New Book: The Origins of Law and Economics, Edited by
Francesco Parisi and Charles K. Rowley
Edward
Elgar Publishing, together with the Locke Institute, has
just announced the publication of The
Origins of Law and Economics: Essays by the Founding
Fathers,
co-edited by Francesco Parisi,
Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Economics
Program, George Mason University and George Mason
University’s Duncan Black Professor of Economics Charles
K. Rowley.
This unique collection of largely unpublished papers brings together the founding fathers
of law and economics to provide their own views on the origins and intellectual history of the field.
Law and economics emerged as a separate field of scholarship during the early 1960s, fueled by two seminal
papers, one by Ronald Coase and one by Guido Calabresi. The ideas generated by scholars researching in
the field have deeply influenced the major disciplines of economics and the law.
The sixteen essays in this book (including three by Nobel Laureates in economic sciences) provide an
impressive blend of differing experiences and varying perspectives, reflecting on the intellectual
foundations of the field, its early struggles for recognition, and its remarkable advance during the
last four decades of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. The essays clearly outline,
and contribute new insights into, all of the central issues of this still vibrant research program.
A unifying theme of the book is the central importance attached by each scholar to scientific analysis,
rather than to any particular ideology or dogma.
Related Links:
Biography of Professor Parisi
Biography of Charles K. Rowley
