Principles and Methods of Law and Economics: Enhancing Normative Analysis

This is an introductory book that targets the reader who has the ambition to apply economic analysis but may be missing a technical introduction to its mathematical techniques or seeks a structured elaboration of its philosophical principles. The book juxtaposes economic analysis with moral philosophy, political theory, egalitarianism, and other methodological principles and then passes to the details of methods such as model-building, derivatives, differential equations, statistical tests, and the use of computer programs.

Introduction: innovation in legal thinking; Part I. Principles: 1. From formal logic to normative reasoning; 2. Social welfare versus moral philosophy; 3. From political philosophy to game theory; 4. The importance of distribution of wealth; 5. Coase and law's irrelevance; 6. More failures of coasean irrelevance; Part II. Methods: 7. Mathematical modelling; 8. Confronting uncertainty: basic probability theory; 9. Advanced probability: distributions as the shape of randomness; 10. How to price uncertainty: finance; 11. Finance and probability: options and derivatives; 12. Using spreadsheets; 13. Statistics; 14. Conclusion: importing methodological innovations.