You’re kidding, right? You must be. Otherwise, you need a lesson in self awareness there buddy. Just peruse the JOE adds from the GMU law school, for example, for all the proof you need. I hasten to add that I don’t think that this is a bad thing….

“Barry – but these are quite different claims from the ‘Marginal Revolution is a hard right website’ one, nicht wahr?”

My comment yesterday that I shouldn’t have agree with that part of Stephen’s comment was eaten by intertubes worms, it appears.

Huh, who?

The major point is that even if many economists were truly not right-wingers, the profession, as well as the L&E subset, got along quite well with the right-wing movement over the past thirty years. Even my personal favorites (DeLong and Krugman) had an attitude during the 1990’s that the limits of respectible liberalism were no further to their left than their left elbows). As was pointed out in Teles’ book, the L&E movement was a right-wing movement. Not centrist, not liberal, not spanning the spectrum.

I also believe the student body is more ethnically and intellectually diverse than at many top-tier law schools and yes that does mean it is probably more politically conservative than is the student body at Harvard Law.

You endorse exchange,free trade and a moderate form of governance and suddenly you are crafting Mein Kampf. SO RICH

Thanks for dropping the bombs fellahs, this thread is toast!

Law and economics has done well, it seems to me, because economics has a lot to say to about the law. Law is public policy, and it’s hard to talk about public policy without economics—it’s an important part of the toolkit, even if not the only tool.

Cowen says law and economics arguments can be easily evaluated. That’s true for him, but he should remember that these arguments are often evaluated—including for publication, unfortunately—by law students and other lawyers.

Cowen says the “conservative” nature of the law and economics movement is already obsolete, and gives Cass Sunstein as an example. Sunstein is a conventional modern liberal when he does lawyering, but his work touching on economics (for example, his work on regulation) is much more moderate. (There was some quiet discomfort in liberal quarters caused by his nomination for precisely that reason.)

I was a bit surprised by Cowen’s take on different sensibilities. The paradigmatic law and economics scholar is Richard Posner. He tends to be libertarian, and it’s hard to think of him as someone who treats the constitution (or any law, for that matter) as something to be glorified. Posner’s reductionism differs quite starkly from the mainstream approach to the constitution taken by most other lawyers. Perhaps the relatively conservative nature of the faculty doing law and econ at George Mason has affected Cowen’s views on the profession more generally—it seems he misdescribes the larger law and econ movement and also misses the fact that most lawyers not doing law and econ or doing it from a liberal starting position treat the constitution as something to be studied, interpreted and defended.

Matt, recall that Ronald Coase was an economist, as was Aaron Director. Director founded and they both edited the Journal of Law and Economics, and both taught at Chicago for many years.

“For these reasons, there has been less of a crisis of conscience or polarization among the market-oriented economists. ”

First, we’ve seen a thirty-odd year stagnation in median wages in the USA, after a period of incredible wage growth; this stagnation coincides nicely with the effects of the L&E movement. The fact that even ‘liberals’ such as Brad DeLong could spend up until the last few years not really giving a care about this is IMHO an indication that the lack of a crisis of conscience among most conomists is a mark against most economists. As for polarization, it’s been pointed out (by Krugman and DeLong) that if one wishes bad economic arguments against the stimulus, one didn’t need to go to CATO or Heritage or AEI; one could go to Chicago and Harvard. The lack of polarization among economists is perhaps another mark against their profession; Mankiw working for Bush is like a cancer researcher putting in a few years with the Tobacco Institute, with far less trouble among his peers.

Even now, as the Great Moderation collapses, and the government is frantically trying to prevent a second Great Depression (and the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis looks increasingly bad), the elite economists haven’t given a sign that they perhaps should re-evaluate the past thirty years of Chicago.

Finally: “One topic which interests me is how the “conservative” law and economics movement, as it is found in legal academia, differs from “market-oriented” economics, as it is found in the economics profession. The “right wing” economist and legal scholar will agree on many issues but you also will find fundamental variations in their temperament and political stances.”

Jim Henley had a great saying about this – ‘they have people for that’. In any movement, there is an allocation of goals and resources: faction A gets policy this, but not policy that, faction B gets policy that, but not policy this. One word for this is ‘trade-off’.
The classical example is people claiming to be libertarian while supporting a Republican administration, even while it does a large amount of very anti-libertarian things. One frequent excuse is ‘the Democrats would be worse’, but that could also translate into “We’re getting what we want most, and the bad stuff we don’t care about” (e.g., that more crony capitalism, more no-bid contracts, lower tax rates on the rich, fewer restraints on those with economic power are well worth a few wars, government spying, ripping up the Bill of Rights, torture of prisoners, politically-motivated prosecutions, etc.).

Trade-offs are sometimes call ‘revealed preferences’; I’ve heard that economists frequently think that insights can be had into a person’s motivations :)

That’s actually pretty funny, especially coming from someone who writes a very politicized hard-right economics blog.

A more relevant topic for this article would have been something like “the failure of politicized economics, or, why economists should learn from the crash and get their theories right before prescribing them to national governments.”