“When we care about something, we waste money on it,” the political theorist Benjamin Barber once told me, an aphorism that came to mind frequently as I read The Conservative Legal Movement in America several months ago. On one level, sure, the book chronicles one of the most successful social and intellectual transformations in American history, and perhaps the only one that did not involve a mass movement. The Law and Economics project in particular had an influence far beyond the legal world, bringing the tools and priorities of neoclassical economics to bear on any question of policy, so that questions such as the appropriate level of regulation in financial markets were answered by the very framing of the question. It was an oversimplification, but not crazy, when someone said to me recently, “I want someone to write the whole story of everything that led to the financial crisis, starting with that whole Law and Economics thing.” [click to continue…]
Posts by author: