It is a real pleasure to read Guido Calabresi’s The Future of Law and Economics almost 20 years after taking his torts class. Calabresi always struck me as a warm and inspiring presence at Yale. He’s attained eminence as a scholar, teacher, and public servant. There is much to learn from and celebrate in his work. I’ll start with his latest book’s major contributions, and then go on to raise some questions about just what future(s) might be in store for law & economics.
Jeremy Bentham casts a long shadow over the legal academy. As Fred Schauer helpfully recounts, Bentham was extraordinarily suspicious of the complexity of law, and wanted it “to be understood by ordinary people without the intervention of lawyers and the interpretation of judges.” Bentham’s utilitarian legacy also stalks the profession of law. Following the lead of cost-benefit analysts, administrators may decide that legal regularity should shrink in importance as a value in comparison with quantified estimates of, say, consumer welfare. As another former Yale dean observed, the reduction of difficult conflicts to purely economic (or philosophical) questions threatens to undermine the autonomy of law as a field.
Calabresi advances this discussion with his crystalline distinction between “Economic Analysis of Law” and “Law & Economics.” I will quote at length here, since this distinction is central to the book:
What I call the Economic Analysis of Law uses economic theory to analyze the legal world. . . . In its most aggressive and reformist mode, having looked at the world from the standpoint of economic theory, if it finds that the legal world does not fit, it proclaims that world to be “irrational.” And this, of course, is exactly what Bentham did when he tested laws and behavior on the basis of utilitarianism and, in his most aggressive moments, dismissed what did not fit as nonsense. . . .
What I call Law and Economics instead begins with an agnostic acceptance of the world as it is, as the lawyer describes it to be. It then looks to whether economic theory can explain that world, that reality. And if it cannot, rather than automatically dismissing that world as irrational, it asks two questions.
The first is, are the legal scholars who are describing the legal reality looking at the world as it really is? Or is there something in their way of seeing the world that has led them to mischaracterize that reality? . . . . If . . . even a more comprehensive view of legal reality discloses rules and practices that economic theory cannot explain, Law and Economics asks a second question. Can economic theory be amplified, can it be made broader or more subtle . . . so that it can explain why the real world of law is at it is?
For Calabresi, behavioral economics is a great example of the kind of “bilateral relationship between economic theory and the world as it is” that he calls Law and Economics, because it has expanded economic theory to account for humans’ predictable irrationalities, and for some higher principles of altruism and fair play.
Calabresi’s chapter on non-profit institutions is a particularly strong vindication of the “Law and Economics” (as opposed to “Economic Analysis of Law”) perspective. For market enthusiasts, the lack of profit motive at universities and hospitals is the key to understanding all that ails them. But from a more cosmopolitan perspective, one could just as easily conclude that the excess marketization of US systems of health and education (relative to, say, a European benchmark) is the better explanation.
Nevertheless, we can still expect plenty of government and corporate agitation to promote the profit motive in these sectors, however bad its results may be. Ugo Mattei (in a 2006 essay on Calabresi’s work) helps explain why: