THE DEBATE ON THE SCIENTIFIC STATUS OF LAW-AND-ECONOMICS

Law & economics is probably one of the most controversial subdisciplin es of economic science. This paper summarizes the discussion on the sc ientific status of law & economics and shows that the major forms of c ritique could have been formulated at the address of economics in gene ral. The criticism stems in large part from the dominant Poppian view on science which makes it highly problematic to stick to imperfect and thus falsified theories, based on unrealistic assumptions and evidenc ed by introspective arguments. Legal economists have tried to defend t heir approach by referring to Friedman's instrumentalism or the relati vist theories of Kuhn and Lakatos, but these turn out to have major sh ortcomings. It is argued that probability or plausibility theories are better equipped to distinguish good from bad theories and to justify the use of unrealistic assumptions, introspective arguments and 'specu lative' Kaldor-Hicks balance weighing.