Two Culture Problems in Law and Economics

Abstract

This Article briefly reviews where law and economics has been and then sets out important problems it now faces. My primary theme is that law and economics faces two two-culture problems. The first is between scholars who self-identify as being in a field-torts, contracts–and who do not use economics in their work and scholars who self-identify as being in the same field but who do. The second is between "field scholars" and technically trained scholars who are not in any particular legal field but who rather look for problems their techniques can solve. The second problem seems easier to ameliorate than the first. Both law and economics types make less progress with implementation issues than they should because they do not access the insights that rational actor political science can yield, a third twoculture problem that seems easier to solve than the others.