Institutional Law and Economics: The Legal-Economic Nexus

Robert Lee Hale was an important lawyer and economist who worked at Columbia University from the 1920's through the 1960's. He is an important figure for thinking about institutional law and economics and we will explore more of him in this blog over time. One of Hale's most important articles is:   Hale, Robert L. "Coercion and distribution in a supposedly non-coercive state."  Political Science Quarterly  38.3 (1923): 470-494. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2142367.pdf Warren Samuels wrote a very long and well thought out article on Hale in the Miami Law Review entitled “The Economy as a system of power and its legal base” by Warren Samuels which can be found here:   https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2750&context=umlr   This may be more useful for economic scholars rather than legal scholars, but economics is based on the idea of voluntary exchange and economists have gone out of their way to avoid questions of power, coercion ...

This is the last post of a four-part series in which the author reflects on four decades of studying and working in the institutionalist tradition of economics . Dr. Charles Whalen is a visiting scholar at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo, and served as the 2018 president of the Association for Evolutionary Economics, an international organization for economists and other social scientists seeking to advance the institutionalist tradition . Whalen's remarks are summarized in four parts: Beginnings ; The Nature of Institutional Economics ; John R. Commons’s Continuing Relevance ; and Assessing the Economy. Reflections of an Institutional Economist Charles Whalen [1] IV. Assessing the Economy: “Reasonable Value” and Unanswered Questions By what standard should we judge the economy and public policy? Conventional economics judges economic outcomes according to the standard of economic efficiency. But institutional economists have...

This is the third of a four-part series in which the author reflects on four decades of studying and working in the institutionalist tradition of economics . Dr. Charles Whalen is a visiting scholar at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo, and served as the 2018 president of the Association for Evolutionary Economics, an international organization for economists and other social scientists seeking to advance the institutionalist tradition . Whalen's remarks are summarized in four parts: Beginnings ; The Nature of Institutional Economics ; John R. Commons’s Continuing Relevance; and Assessing the Economy , and will be released each Monday from February 10th to March 2nd, 2020. Reflections of an Institutional Economist Charles Whalen [1] Part III. Reclaiming the “Right to Work” as a Progressive Cause: John R. Commons’s Continuing Relevance Today in the United States, a number of members of Congress — including some running for Pres...