Reviews for The origins of law and economics

The average rating for The origins of law and economics based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-07-22 00:00:00 Scott Thomas Most lists of "What to Read the Summer Before Law School" are bullshit. One's concerns the first year are overwhelming practical -- Am I cut out for this job? What should I learn from these cases? What should I take away from the class discussion? How can I tell a good outline from a poor one? How should I prepare for tests? -- yet the books suggested to incoming 1Ls offer little or no answers to these questions. Here's the nonsense they usually recommend: 1. Broad "theory" books Examples include Holmes's "The Common Law", Posner's "Economic Analysis of the Law", and Epstein's "Simple Rules for a Complex World" or Rawls's "A Theory of Justice". These books may be wonderful (not Holmes -- he's a shitty writer), but they are unhelpful when it comes to navigating your first year. They are better left to 2nd and 3rd year classes on legal theory or jurisprudence. (BTW, completely avoid Levi's "An Introduction to Legal Reasoning". It's horribly written and fit only for making paper airplanes.) 2. Legal history Examples include Friedman's "A History of American Law" and usually some work on the history of the Supreme Court. If you're interested in this field take an elective on legal history your 2nd or 3rd year. If your school doesn't offer a class on legal history (as mine sadly doesn't), save it for sometime after your first year. By then you'll know something about, say, estates in land and it'll make a helluva lot more sense. 3. Accounts of landmark legal cases, Supreme Court justice memoirs, and other general-audience legal nonfiction Examples include Harr's "A Civil Action", Turow's "One L", Lewis's "Gideon's Trumpet", and Sterns's "The Buffalo Creek Disaster". Again, some of these books are really excellent, but they will NOT help prepare you for your first year. They may be great stories, they may reassure you about your chosen profession -- so what? You need books that will help you make sense of the cases you'll be reading and concepts you'll be learning. In that regard these books are worthless. 4. Great literature Examples include almost anything on Western Literature Hits List, but ones that seem to pop up repeatedly include "Crime and Punishment", "The Brother Karamozov", and "Bleak House". Anyone who includes a novel on their list is not to be trusted because they are not serious about helping, you, the new law student. So, now that I've told you what to avoid, what books should the eager-to-succeed 1L seek out the summer before he/she starts? 1. Any one of the "how to succeed" in law school books Currently, the most popular seems to be Miller's "Law School Confidential" but I found Greene's "Law School for Dummies" to be just as helpful and there are many more like Deaver's "The Complete Law School Companion", Noyes's "Acing Your First Year of Law School", and Hricik's "Law School Basics". It's probably a good idea to read any two of these to compare the similarities and differences of approach. 2. John Delaney's "Learning Legal Reasoning" Yes, briefing is a pain in the ass, but it's important and Delaney teaches you WHY and exactly HOW to do it. Law schools should automatically send copies of this book to all incoming 1Ls. 3. A book on test-taking Fischl and Paul's "Getting to Maybe" is highly regarded by many but I haven't read it so I can't vouch. I have read John Delaney's "How To Do Your Best on Law School Exams" and can recommend it. For those with a little extra money, I would also get Wentworth Miller's 8-CD & Workbook "Legal Essay Exam Writing System" aka LEEWS. 4. The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law I've only read the first three chapters of this books but it's already clear this belongs on the shortlist of indispensable books to read before starting law school. At first blush, it looks like one of the "theory" books said to avoid in the first list. And, yes, the book is heavy on theory. The difference is this book is not about one overarching theory but many different ones, some of which you will see invoked repeatedly as rationales in judicial opinions and during class discussion. Understanding the difference between the ex post and ex ante perspectives or the idea of efficiency will put you WAY AHEAD of the other students in class. It's one thing to be able to read a case and extract the rule. It's a whole different, deeper and subtler level of comprehension to be able to understand the reasoning behind the rule and point out alternatives the judge failed to take into account. This book will help you do that.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-09 00:00:00 Ruthanne Trefelner 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.