Private Law Theory

Introduction:
The economic analysis of law and legal institutions, or the law-and-economics movement, originally a distinct North American phenomenon that emerged in the 1960s, has become a widespread tool for a certain conceptualisation and understanding of legal problems. Prominent representatives of the law-and-economics approach especially regard intellectual property as a ‘natural field for economic analysis of law’. Since its inception, this form of analysis has been met with suspicion, as it was felt that law-and-economics tried to take over other social sciences and establish a kind of ‘economics imperialism’. This criticism has to be taken seriously because the law-and-economics analysis does not only reconceptualise otherwise dissimilar fields of knowledge in a rather unrecognisable way to the ‘home-grown’ researchers of the other fields, it also alters, deforms, or even destroys the object of research …” (more)

Andreas Rahmatian, ‘International Intellectual Property Scholars Series: A Fundamental Critique of the Law-and-Economics Analysis of Intellectual Property Rights’, 17 Intellectual Property Law Review 191 (2013).

First posted 2013-12-06 09:59:57