Economic Foundations of Private Law

This reader brings together some seminal papers on law and economics, with special emphasis on the foundational contributions to the economics of property, contracts and torts.

The growing influence of these writings in the judicial profession, and in the academic world, underscores the relevance and importance of these early contributions and the growing maturity of the law and economics movement.

These papers have provided the foundations for the development of an overarching economic theory of law and, most importantly,have opened new areas of research for present and future generations of jurists and economists alike.

The articles are arranged by theme, with topics including the methodological foundations of law and economics, the efficiency of the common law hypothesis,the economics of property law and the Coase theorem, the economics of contracts and the economics of tort law.