Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“
Under Cover of Science fills a genuine gap in the literature by providing a thorough overview of the relationship between developments in scientific thought and developments in legal thought. That there is a relationship has been obvious to several generations of legal historians, and there are lots and lots of references and suggestions about how it might work. But until now no one that I know of has made a focused effort to lay it all out.”—Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School
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Under Cover of Science is a sweeping intellectual history that relates the development of law and economics to science and its claims to objectivity. James R. Hackney Jr. ranges from Newton to Darwin to Einstein, and from classical economics to institutional economics to neoclassical economics. I cannot think of another book that so extensively explores the history of the interrelations of law and economics.”—Stephen M. Feldman, author of
American Legal Thought from Premodernism to Postmodernism: An Intellectual Voyage“James R. Hackney Jr. has written the definitive intellectual history of the origins of the law and economics movement. Weaving rich separate histories of legal and economic thought into broader changes in the governing premises of science and philosophy, Hackney has offered a powerful account of the rise of this influential school of thought.”—Morton Horwitz, Harvard Law School
“James R. Hackney Jr.’s book does a fine job of relating the evolution of jurisprudential thinking about one important area of conventional lawyers’ law, namely accident law, to the philosophical ‘surround,’ showing how changes in philosophy have influenced the evolution of legal thought, with specific reference to the now-dominant economic vein in that thought.”—Richard A. Posner, Judge, United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and Senior Lecturer, University of Chicago Law School
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Prologue. The Structure of American Legal-Economic Theory xiii
1. Modern Science, Classical Thought, and the Birth of American Legal-Economic Theory 1
2. The Pragmatic Reconstruction of American Legal-Economic Theory 39
3. Neoclassicism and the Reprise of Formalism 81
4. The Dissolution of American Legal-Economic Theory 121
Epilogue. Gazing into the Future and Our Postmodern Times 157
Notes 175
Index 227
