The Economic Approach to Law
Thomas J. Miceli
K487.E3 M528 2009
From the Publisher: [This book] provides an introductory treatment of law and economics, revealing how economic principles explain the structure of the law, and how they can help make the law more efficient. To that end, the author focuses on unifying themes in the field—rather than exhaustively covering legal topics—and thus provides a more analytical treatment of the subject. The second edition includes current research into the economics of common law areas, such as torts, contracts, and property law. The revised text also offers a new chapter that explores how economics can be applied to anti-trust law, as well as added material on intellectual property. This edition features an expanded suite of exercises and problems at the end of each chapter to encourage students to “do” law and economics.
Theoretical Foundations of Law and Economics
edited by Mark D. White
K487.E3 T48 2009
From the Publisher: The economic approach to law, or ‘law and economics’, is by far the most successful application of basic economic principles to another scholarly field, but most of the critical appraisal of the field has been scattered among law reviews and economics journals. Theoretical Foundations of Law and Economics is the first original, book-length examination of the methodology and philosophy of law and economics, featuring new essays written by leading legal scholars, philosophers, and economists. The contributors take issue with many of the key tenets of the economic approach to law, such as its assumption of rational behavior, its reliance on market analogies, and its adoption of efficiency as the primary goal of legal decision-making. They discuss the relevance of economics to the law in general, as well as to substantive areas of the law, such as contracts, torts, and crime.
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Paul Krugman
HB3716 .K77 2009
From the Publisher: Our newest Nobel Prize-winning economist shows how today’s crisis parallels the events that caused the Great Depression—and explains what it will take to avoid catastrophe. In 1999, in The Return of Depression Economics, Paul Krugman surveyed the economic crises that had swept across Asia and Latin America, and pointed out that those crises were a warning for all of us: like diseases that have become resistant to antibiotics, the economic maladies that caused the Great Depression were making a comeback. In the years that followed, as Wall Street boomed and financial wheeler-dealers made vast profits, the international crises of the 1990s faded from memory. But now depression economics has come to America: when the great housing bubble of the mid-2000s burst, the U.S. financial system proved as vulnerable as those of developing countries caught up in earlier crises and a replay of the 1930s seems all too possible.
In this new, greatly updated edition of [this book], Krugman shows how the failure of regulation to keep pace with an increasingly out-of-control financial system set the United States, and the world as a whole, up for the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s. He also lays out the steps that must be taken to contain the crisis, and turn around a world economy sliding into a deep recession. Brilliantly crafted in Krugman’s trademark style–lucid, lively, and supremely informed–this new edition of The Return of Depression Economics will become an instant cornerstone of the debate over how to respond to the crisis.
Capacitas: Contract Law and the Institutional Preconditions of a Market Economy
edited by Simon Deakin and Alain Supiot
K840 .C36 2009
From the Publisher: One of the principal tasks for legal research at the beginning of the 21st century is to reconstruct the understanding of the relationship between the legal system and the market order. After almost three decades of deregulation driven by a belief in the self-equilibrating properties of the market, the financial crisis of 2008 has reminded everyone of the fundamental truth that markets have legal and institutional foundations, without which they cannot effectively function. The chapters in the present volume are the result of work by a group of legal scholars which began in the mid-2000s, at a time when the shortcomings of deregulatory policies were becoming clear in a number of contexts. The chapters address the question of how the language of contract law describes or conceptualises the market order and the relationship of the law to it. The perspectives taken are, in turn, historical, comparative, and contextspecific.
The focus of the book is on a foundational idea, the concept of capacitas, which signifies a status conferred upon citizens for the purpose of enabling them to participate in the economic life of the polity. In modern legal systems, ‘capacity’ is the principal juridical mechanism by which individuals and entities are empowered to enter into legally binding agreements and, more generally, to arrange their affairs using the instruments of private law. Legal capacity is thereby the gateway to involvement in the operations of a market economy.
Meltdown: A Free-market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts will Make Things Worse
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
HB3722 .W66 2009
From the Publisher: The media tells us that “deregulation” and “unfettered free markets” have wrecked our economy and will continue to make things worse without a heavy dose of federal regulation. But the real blame lies elsewhere. In Meltdown, bestselling author Thomas E. Woods Jr. unearths the real causes behind the collapse of housing values and the stock market—and it turns out the culprits reside more in Washington than on Wall Street. And the trillions of dollars in federal bailouts? Our politicians’ ham-handed attempts to fix the problems they themselves created will only make things much worse. Woods, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and winner of the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Award, busts the media myths and government spin. He explains how government intervention in the economy—from the Democratic hobby horse called Fannie Mae to affirmative action programs like the Community Redevelopment Act—actually caused the housing bubble. Most important, Woods, author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History, traces this most recent boom-and-bust—and all such booms and busts of the past century—back to one of the most revered government institutions of all: the Federal Reserve System, which allows busy-body bureaucrats and ambitious politicians to pull the strings of our financial sector and manipulate the value of the very money we use. Meltdown also provides a timely history lesson to counter the current clamor for a new New Deal. The Great Depression, Woods demonstrates, was only as deep and as long as it was because of the government interventions by Herbert Hoover (no free-market capitalist, despite what your high school history teacher may have taught you) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (no savior of the American economy, in spite of what the mainstream media says). If you want to understand what caused the financial meltdown—and why none of the big-government solutions being tried today will work—Meltdown explains it all.
ThomChat 