The origins of law and economics Book

Upon receiving a letter of acceptance to Chicago Law School last winter, a friend of mine at Harvard Law wrote me an email recommending three books as absolute must-reads prior to beginning my 1L year: "The Bramble Bush" by Karl Llewellyn, "Getting to Maybe" by Richard Michael Fischl and Jeremy Paul, and "The Legal Analyst" by Ward Farnsworth. All three have proven extremely stimulating, and although their relevance has not yet been borne out by the rigors of my first year of law school (which begins in just two months), I am confident that they will provide great value as I begin to study the law.

Farnsworth, a professor at Boston University Law School, seeks to erect an analytical framework for students new to the law. Rather than approach the law as a discipline unto itself, Farnsworth instead illuminates the interdisciplinary aspect of law currently in vogue within the legal academy, illustrating the use of intuitions from economics, game theory, psychology, and more as it applies to legal disputes. The work is split into five parts: Incentives; Trust, Cooperation, and Other Problems for Multiple Players; Jurisprudence; Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept: The Endowment Effect and Kindred Ideas; and Problems of Proof.

This book is very readable, with chapters that stand on their own and can be read selectively as the situation demands; in this sense, it makes not only a great read for the summer before law school, but also a reference for current students and practitioners of the law. Each chapter spans only about 10 pages, and follows a fairly formulaic outline, beginning with the theory of the topic of interest and then providing several examples from real and imaginary disputes and settlements.

Although this approach is effective at times, it also tends to wear the reader down. The formula turns into an almost tedious repetition, which makes it difficult to read for too long of a time without becoming at least a little bit bored. Furthermore, since this book serves primarily as a primer for a law student unfamiliar with legal analysis, many of the topics discussed maintain a fairly narrow scope. A student of economics, for example, will find Farnsworth's treatment of these issues (which comprises well over half of the book; a tip-of-the-hat to the dominance of the law & economics school) somewhat pedantic and basic. A full 80 pages spent on problems of game theory such as the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Stag Hunt, Chicken, and other staples of introductory game theory courses led me almost to skip this section entirely.

However, this book does not purport to be a comprehensive treatment of these issues and their relevance to the law. As the work's subtitle indicates, Farnsworth aims to provide "A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law," and to this end, he does a remarkable job. By drawing connections between various disciplines and focusing on concrete examples rather than abstract theory, Farnsworth creates an excellent book that introduces students of the law to the ideas that permeate the discipline but that were otherwise not taught in any class - or in any book - until now.