Institutional Law and Economics: The Legal-Economic Nexus

This past May, Dr. Eric Scorsone and I had the opportunity to host meetings with some of those still active and interested in Michigan-Wisconsin Institutional Economics (or the Great Lakes School of Institutional Economics). As part of these meetings, we were able to interview Dr. Daniel Bromley, Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics as part of our oral history project. In a 30-minute interview at the Kellogg Center, Eric (as interviewer) attempted to touch on as many important parts of Bromley's story as possible. The interview starts at the beginning of Bromley's academic career at Utah State in the early 1960's, where he studied Ecology. From there, Bromley talks about his transition into issues of law and institutions, the conception of his earliest works, and ultimately the conception of his latest book, Possessive Individualism: A Crisis of Capitalism (Available October 14th, Oxford Press).

It is now 2019, a century and a handful of months since economist and lawyer Walton Hamilton (1881-1958) published his “plea for a particular kind of [economic] theory” in the pages of the American Economic Review .  Hamilton felt that the state of the field of economics had lost its course, failing to address real problems or “truly recognize the complexity of the relations which bind human welfare to industry.” In response to these concerns, he published “The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory”. Hamilton was writing at a time when neoclassical economic ideas were taking shape.  He describes value theory as having overcome the older system of institutional theory for dominance over the classical doctrine, and his writing is critical of the use of words like “utility” and “productivity” that are very familiar in the economic sciences today, but were still in the process of being defined.  In “The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory”, he almost unintentionally sets Ins