ABSTRACT
The Law and Economics movement, or economic analysis of law, owes a great debt to Jeremy Bentham. This debt goes as far as to consider his work the genesis of the movement. Yet his role and influence are seldom acknowledged beyond his work on crime and punishment. This chapter sheds some light on three Benthamite moves that position his work as a definite precursor to the law-and-economists’ work of the 1960s and beyond. First, Bentham’s pleasure-pain calculus is akin to the law-and-economists’ cost-benefit analysis. Second, like the law-and-economists, Bentham proposed a felicific calculus using money and wealth to calculate pleasures and pains – an unknown fact to many (including the law-and-economists themselves). Third, this felicific calculus allowed Bentham to bring an economic analysis to measure desirability in non-economic legal fields – a characteristic the law-and-economists claim they invented. To substantiate these moves, this chapter looks closely into Bentham’s influence upon Law and Economics to depict a much broader influence or debt. In recognizing this influence, and also how it was cast outside the spotlight, the chapter narrates an alternative account of Law and Economics.
Waked, Dina I, Jeremy Bentham and the Genesis of Law and Economics: An Alternative Narrative (October 17, 2024).
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