New Challenges for Law and Economics

September 11-12, 2020,  Columbia University, New York

The field of Law and Economics has undergone major transformations over the past 50 years.  During that time, scholars have addressed many of the critiques of the early scholarship. Some of the progress in using economic reasoning to explain and critique legal rules are happy consequences of major deliberative moments, in which many of these challenges were raised and discussed. We believe that the time is ripe for another major deliberative event.

The Center for Contract and Economic Organization at Columbia Law School and The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law will convene a conference on New Challenges for Law and Economics at Columbia Law School in September 11-12, 2020, in which we will bring together law & economics with legal theorists in order to address what we believe are the frontier issues of law and economics, focusing mainly on its methodology and normative foundations:

• The early work in law and economics was largely theoretical, mapping the coincidence between basic private law doctrine and economic reasoning.  Subsequently, scholars began to use economic analysis as a critical tool, providing trenchant normative critiques of basic doctrines.  More recently, the energy has turned to empirical studies, using sophisticated econometrics to validate some of the basic theoretical claims.  But the divide between those who do theory and those who are empiricists seems to have grown wider.  Many theorists question the relevance of empirical studies that use sophisticated data sets to study relatively narrow questions.  Similarly, many empiricists regard theoretical speculations as, just that, speculations without foundation.  The question, then, is whether it is possible to propose ways to integrate theoretical and empirical approaches in a more productive way.
• While some law and economics scholars subscribe to welfarism as a foundational normative theory, many do not. This causes no difficulty in work that deals with areas of law (or questions within areas of law) that are amenable to a monist welfarist analysis. But it does raise interesting questions and challenges outside these domains. These challenges are also, we think, an opportunity, partly because the tools of economic analysis may significantly contribute (if they can be properly fine-tuned) to these non-welfare accounts. A focal question here is how can law and economic scholars adjust their normative premises so as to offer rigorous analyses of legal doctrines that can or should focus (or focus also) on values such as autonomy and equality, as well as to acknowledge and address the possibility of value incomensurabilities.

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Co- Sponsored by the Center for Contract and Economic Organization, Columbia University and The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University     

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