内容简介

What does economics have to do with law? Suppose legislators propose that armed robbers receive life imprisonment. Editorial pages applaud them for getting tough on crime. Constitutional lawyers raise the issue of cruel and unusual punishment. Legal philosophers ponder questions of justness. An economist, on the other hand, observes that making the punishment for armed robbery the same as that for murder encourages muggers to kill their victims. This is the cut-to-the-chase quality that makes economics not only applicable to the interpretation of law, but beneficial to its crafting.

Drawing on numerous commonsense examples, in addition to his extensive knowledge of Chicago-school economics, David D. Friedman offers a spirited defense of the economic view of law. He clarifies the relationship between law and economics in clear prose that is friendly to students, lawyers, and lay readers without sacrificing the intellectual heft of the ideas presented. Friedman is the ideal spokesman for an approach to law that is controversial not because it overturns the conclusions of traditional legal scholars--it can be used to advocate a surprising variety of political positions, including both sides of such contentious issues as capital punishment--but rather because it alters the very nature of their arguments. For example, rather than viewing landlord-tenant law as a matter of favoring landlords over tenants or tenants over landlords, an economic analysis makes clear that a bad law injures both groups in the long run. And unlike traditional legal doctrines, economics offers a unified approach, one that applies the same fundamental ideas to understand and evaluate legal rules in contract, property, crime, tort, and every other category of law, whether in modern day America or other times and places--and systems of non-legal rules, such as social norms, as well.

This book will undoubtedly raise the discourse on the increasingly important topic of the economics of law, giving both supporters and critics of the economic perspective a place to organize their ideas.

作品目录

Dedication

Part I: IN DEFENSE OF PROPERTY (Not currently webbed)

Poem: A Saint Said

1. In Defense of Property

2. A Necessary Digression

3. Love Is Not Enough

Interlude

4. Robin Hood Sells Out

5. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Richer

6. Monopoly I: How To Lose Your Shirt

7. Monopoly II: State Monopoly for Fun and Profit

8. Exploitation and Interest

9. I Don't Need Nothing

Part II: LIBERTARIAN GRAB BAG OR HOW TO SELL THE STATE IN SMALL PIECES (Not currently webbed)

Poem: Paranoia

10. Sell the Schools

11. A Radical Critique of American Universities

12. The Impossibility of a University

13. Adam Smith U.

14. Open the Gates

15. Sell the Streets

16. 99and 44/100ths Percent Built

17. A First Step

18. Counterattack

19. Might Have Been

20. Is William F Buckley a Contagious Disease?

21. Its My Life

22. The Rights of Youth

23. Creeping Capitalism

24. If You Want It, Buy It

25. Scarce Means Finite

26. Pollution

27. Buckshot for a Socialist Friend

Part III: ANARCHY IS NOT CHAOS (two chapters webbed)

Poem: Anarchy is not Chaos

28. What is Anarchy? What is Government?

29. Police, Courts, and Laws--on theMarket

30. The Stability Problem

31.. Is Anarcho-Capitalism Libertarian?

32. And, As a Free Bonus

33. Socialism, Limited Government, Anarchy, and Bikinis

(A polish translation of Chapter 33 has also been webbed.)

34. National Defense: The Hard Problem

35. In Which Prediction is Reduced to Speculation

36. Why Anarchy?

37. Revolution ls the Hell of It

38. Economics of Theft, or the Nonexistence of the Ruling Class

39. The Right Sideof the Public Good Trap

40. How to Get There from Here

Postscript for Perfectionists

Part IV: FOR LIBERTARIANS--AN EXPANDED POSTSCRIPT (three chapters webbed)

Poem: Second Edition

41: Problems

42: Where I Stand

43: Answers: The Economic Analysis of Law

44. Private Law Enforcement, Medieval Iceland, and Libertarianism

(A Polish translation of Chapter 44 has been webbed.)

45. Is There a Libertarian Foreign Policy?

46. The Market for Money

47. Anarchist Politics:Concerning the Libertarian Party.

48. G. K. Chesterton--An Author Review

Appendix I: SomeNumbers

Appendix II: My Competition

Index