1. Disciplinary Collisions: Blum, Kalven, and the Economic Analysis of Accident Law at Chicago in the 1960s
- Author
-
Marciano, Alain, Medema, Steve, Montpellier Recherche en Economie (MRE), and Université de Montpellier (UM)
- Subjects
Chicago ,History of Economic Ideas ,accidents ,History of Political Economy ,Tort Law ,[SHS.ECO]Humanities and Social Sciences/Economics and Finance ,Kalven ,[SHS.HISPHILSO]Humanities and Social Sciences/History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences ,[SHS.DROIT]Humanities and Social Sciences/Law ,Automobile ,Liability ,History of Economic Thought through 1925 ,Economic analysis of law ,Blum - Abstract
International audience; The University of Chicago occupies a central place in the history of law and economics. To this point, however, scant attention has been given in the literature to how the prospect of an economic analysis of law was received within the Law School at Chicago when the subject was in its infancy. In this paper we focus on the work of two prominent dissenters: Law professors Walter J. Blum and Harry Kalven, Jr. We show that, although immersed in economics and interacting with the main actors of the law and economics movement in the early 1950s, Blum and Kalven largely rejected economics as a possible and useful help for solving legal problems, both because of their concerns about the utility of economics in the legal realm and because of their sense that economics and law are grounded in fundamentally incompatible normative visions.
- Published
- 2018