Game Stories

Abstract

In any discussion of "Law-And-", the elephant in the room is Law and Economics ("L&E"). Economic analysis has had greater success than any other discipline as a colonizer of legal scholarship. The main contenders, Law and Society and Law and Humanities, are certainly robust in their own rights, but relative to L&E, these approaches are underweight, and their adherents have been known to seethe at the capacity of L&E scholars to smother practically every legal field in sight. In recent years, a number of L&E scholars have adopted a new tool, game theory, that expands their imperial claims even further. The simplest and best-known games in game theory are typically represented by a set of conventional stories. But that fact—that the games are represented by stories—makes these games a fair target for one branch of Law and Humanities scholarship, namely Law and Literature.