Disciplinary Collisions: Blum, Kalven, and the Economic Analysis of Accident Law at Chicago in the 1960s

Alain Marciano and Steven Medema ()

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Abstract: The University of Chicago occupies a central place in the history of law and economics. To this point, however, scant attention has been given in the literature to how the prospect of an economic analysis of law was received within the Law School at Chicago when the subject was in its infancy. In this paper we focus on the work of two prominent dissenters: Law professors Walter J. Blum and Harry Kalven, Jr. We show that, although immersed in economics and interacting with the main actors of the law and economics movement in the early 1950s, Blum and Kalven largely rejected economics as a possible and useful help for solving legal problems, both because of their concerns about the utility of economics in the legal realm and because of their sense that economics and law are grounded in fundamentally incompatible normative visions.

Keywords: Economic analysis of law; Chicago; Blum; Kalven; Liability; Tort Law; Automobile; accidents; History of Political Economy; History of Economic Thought through 1925; History of Economic Ideas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-law
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Published in Law and Economics as Interdisciplinary Practice, In press

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01836082

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