FIRMLY GROUNDED - ECONOMICS IN THE FUTURE OF THE LAW

Law and economics has appealed to legal scholars and practitioners and has had such an important impact on legal doctrine because, using a c oherent theory of human decision-making (rational choice theory), law and economics offers an attractive method of describing how people are likely to respond to law and of making normative judgments about lega l rules and institutions. In this Article, the author speculates on th e future course of scholarship in law and economics. Ho identifies fou r areas in which work is likely to concentrate: the filling-in of gaps in our economic understanding of particular areas of private and publ ic law; the unification of economic theory across five areas in the la w; the expansion of empirical work; and the emendation of rational cho ice theory.