Preface

Summary

The economics of law is an exciting enterprise and a permanent feature of legal scholarship and economics. But it has made limited inroads in Europe especially if one removes the areas of economic regulation and competition law. One of the reasons for this is the unavailability of texts that cover the subject in a non-technical way and without a focus on North American law. Economic Principles of Law has been written to redress this imbalance, and to show that the economics of law has equal applicability to the more than fifty common law jurisdictions outside North America, in this case that of England and Wales.

This book is an introduction to the economics of law for the law student and non-economist. It is neither a legal nor economics text. It is a sampler of the way that economics has been used to examine law generally, and in particular the core areas of the common law – property, contract, tort and crime. The economics used rarely goes beyond the first several chapters of an undergraduate economics text covering basic supply and demand analysis. The discussion is deliberately non-technical except for the odd lapses into diagrams (reflecting the author's professional self-indulgence) which are relegated to boxes separated from the main text which may be skipped without destroying the discussion or sowing seeds of doubt in the readers' mind. At the suggestion of one reviewer I have added an economics glossary to assist the lawyer further in dealing with any jargon.