The Analytical Failures of Law and Economics

'The Analytical Failures of Law and Economics is a brilliant, path-breaking book. Informal economic reasoning has long figured in the common law, but beginning just past the mid-Twentieth Century, there arose, and soon became prominent in academic scholarship a formal, hyper-rational, efficiency-based school of thought known as law and economics. Bayern completely undercuts this school through the employment of the very analytical techniques the school employs. He shows that a fundamental principle of law and economics is to exclude considerations of morality and non-efficiency policies and that this exclusion is untenable, because it fails to explain what the law is, why the law is what it is, and what the law should be. He shows too that even small shortfalls in the law and economics model of the world, such as its erroneous assumptions of perfect rationality and perfect markets, bring the model crashing down.' Melvin Eisenberg, Jesse H. Choper Professor of Law Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley Law School 'Bayern exposes the analytical features of economic analysis that prevent it from providing definitive or satisfying answers to normative questions about what legal rules we should adopt for torts, contracts, or property. He demonstrates why economics must be supplemented with moral and practical considerations that go beyond oversimplified economic models.' Joseph William Singer, Bussey Professor of Law, Harvard Law School 'The Analytical Failures of Law and Economics is that rarest of scholarly monographs, driven by a powerful and focused argument, and gracefully informed by erudition well beyond its primary subject matter. A rigorous synthesis of many years of research, Bayern's work should discredit fragile, empirically unsupported, and logically inconsistent models that still distort legal opinions, textbooks, and scholarship. The book also points the way toward a better methodology more responsive to the lived realities of contracts, torts, and property law.' Frank Pasquale, Jeffrey D. Forchelli Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School, and author of The Black Box Society