http://s-usih.org/2014/08/explaining-the-rise-of-law-and-economics.html
Three Ways of Explaining the Rise of “Law and Economics,” and
Also, One Way (Guest Post by Sara Mayeux)
Posted on August 23, 2014 by L.D. Burnett
[The
following is a guest post by Sara Mayeux, a Sharswood Fellow at the
University of Pennsylvania Law School and a PhD candidate in history at
Stanford. Her research focuses on the history of American criminal law
and institutions. She can be found on Twitter at @saramayeux.]
[snip]
But the real star of Teles’s account is Henry Manne, “the movement’s
first organization entrepreneur” (101). Across stints at George
Washington University, the University of Rochester, the University of
Miami, and Emory, and ultimately as dean of the George Mason University
Law School, Manne proved a tireless organizer who, through trial and
error, became adept at securing funding from conservative and
libertarian patrons such as the Olin Foundation and the Liberty Fund. At
Rochester, Manne hosted summer economics seminars for law professors,
designed to equip them with microeconomics tools that they could
incorporate in their scholarship. In 1973, he turned down an offer at
Yale and instead moved to Miami, where he could have free rein to start a
Law and Economics Center and do whatever he wanted with it. There,
Manne continued to host gatherings of law professors and also started an
annual institute for federal judges, giving them a free trip to a
luxury South Florida resort in exchange for sitting through two weeks of
economics seminars. “At its height, in 1990,” Teles notes, “the
Economics Institute for Federal Judges hosted 40 percent of the federal
judiciary, including [then-appellate judges] Ruth Bader Ginsburg and
Clarence Thomas” (113).
Manne’s programs, Teles concludes, were important not just or even
primarily because they equipped lawyers and judges with economics
concepts, but because they symbolically “helped erase law and economics’
stigma, since if judges … took the ideas seriously, they could not be
crazy and irresponsible” (217). Although Manne’s organizing efforts hit
upon several roadblocks due to personality conflicts and, ultimately, a
falling out with the Olin Foundation, over the long run, he proved
remarkably successful at promoting and institutionalizing law and
economics within the legal academy. Indeed, Teles suggests that, without
Manne’s unique entrepreneurial talents, “it is far from certain that
anyone else would have built the movement’s organizational
infrastructure” (133).
[Henry Manne, the man who launched thousands of inside traders who incessantly
capture the so-called rents of monetary nihilism]
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