Reviewing Warren Samuels Legal Economic Nexus article

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The next series of blog posts concern reviewing ideas from several articles of Warren Samuels. We will take each section of the paper and dissect the ideas from Warren Samuels “The Legal Economic Nexus” paper from the George Washington Law Review (v.57, issue 6) in 1988-1898. This first post is simply about the introduction of the paper. From there, we will discuss the three main sections of the paper each week.

The first paragraph is expansively broad and packs a punch. We are told that in using Foucault we can understand that people make a distinction between a public and private part of life and the community. What does this mean “in the sense of Foucault?”  I think Samuels meant that Foucault thought about how ideas represent notions or objects in the real world.  In this case, Samuels meant that we use these words, polity and economy to represent two separate and independent concepts that exist in reality.  The concept that we think of them in our minds that they are separate from one another is the key point that Samuels wants to challenge here.  Another way he emphasizes this point is the last sentence that states we specifically use language to make real in our minds the notion that economy and government are separate spheres of the world.

Samuels goes on to blame our use of language, including his own,  to emphasize this distinction. We talk about law and economics and the economic role of government as if they are separate spheres that might intersect on a Venn diagram.  But if we talk about the subjects in this manner, we only continue the tradition of seeing them as separate concepts or domains that can be studied independently of one another.


Finally, we get to Samuels key argument. We must view these two separate domains actually originally from a common place. Samuels will then show us how this works relative to more traditional analysis. The article proceeds from here with using certain facts and cases in the world to be “differently apprehended” to allow Samuels to show how new concepts and representations can be used from the nexus as opposed to the traditional separation of law (polity) and economics (economy).


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