You called me on my failure to attend an L&E seminar–I really have thought about it. The honest answer is that every year I am invited to more fun professional events (talks and conferences in exotic places); and, other than that, I have obligations to my family. L&E boot camp always seems to slip down the list.

I guess we are all in the same situation. The barriers to understanding test our commitment and desire to know.

Brian

So what can be done?

You suggest that L&E has a special burden here because of its historical association with conservative institutions. That is fair enough. I also agree with your view that L&E is not itself an inherently conservative discipline. It only requires a passing look at modern L&E scholarship to conclude that much of it favors liberal policies. It is true that any person with economics training might tend to think more carefully about when markets work, think more systematically about market failure arguments, and perhaps have some sensitivity to unintended consequences by virtue of thinking about how regulation might impact incentives. I suppose one could argue that these are conservative principles. But I don’t find that too persuasive. And if one includes the modern behavioral L&E scholarship, the overwhelming fraction of L&E would be liberal (in terms of the leaning of its policy recommendations).

One solution is L&E training seminars. If we cant get interested outsiders to go and participate, I think that is a sad sign for L&E. A pessimistic version of this argument might be that L&E cant recruit the interested outsiders (many of whom became insiders in the first two generations) because of the state of economics. I hope that is not the case. But it is a concern.

I suppose I ought to ask you, Brian, as a representative interested outsider, why don’t you go to these L&E training seminars? Being busy doesn’t count. Outsiders were busy in the first two generations when they flocked in droves to these programs. I think there are a few possible answers.

The first is that L&E isn’t as exciting as it used to be, in large part because of the inaccessibility of modern L&E scholarship. Like you say, you might be able to learn basic economics and still not be able to read modern scholarship at the level of understand you’d like. I bet that wasn’t true 30 years ago.

A second possibility, somewhat related to the first, is that L&E has more competition than it used to. L&E and other inter-disciplinary fields are competing for your attention. In the first two generations, I think an argument can be made that L&E faced less competition for the attention of interested outsiders.

It could be a combination of both or other factors. In any event, my point is that I feel like L&E is not doing as good of a job marketing itself to the interested outsiders as it used to. And perhaps there is a less concerted and designed effort to do so because of its success. But I think these efforts are just as important today as they were 30 years ago. And if you’re right about the extra burden because of conservative historical associations, perhaps will be even harder now than they were then.

There are other potential solutions, some that I discuss in this post. But this is already a very long comment. I’ll try to address more of this in the next post.

Thanks for the informative series of posts.

You have touched on, though perhaps not answered, what I think might be a core problem. It’s not that interested outsiders–those who find value in these studies–cannot follow the studies; the bigger problem is we (or at least I) lack the capacity to evaluate the study design in every detail (what left out, what alternatives, what framing “produced,” potential design flaws, etc.). Outsiders can figure out some of this in broad terms, perhaps, but always with the sense that there is much that escapes the eye. It’s hard to rely upon something that you do not grasp in detail fine-grained enough to critically evaluate.

Sorry to put it in such vague terms, but that’s what it means to be an outsider. L&E scholars might have the same feeling when they read third generation legal positivism literature.

In the L&E context this concern about hidden/concealed problems is magnified by the history of L&E, which shows close associations with conservative political groups (Olin Foundation and Liberty Fund, you mention above). Of course there are liberals doing L&E today, and there is nothing inherently conservative about L&E, in my view (others disagree), but the close historical association might serve to heighten the concern of outsiders about the reliability of a body of work that is difficult to critically assess.

The obvious answer to people like me is that we should go to one of the many L&E training seminars –and that is certainly one part of the solution (I hope to make it to one some time soon). But that is a limited solution, first, because I doubt whether attending these sessions will do more than convey the basics, and, second, because most law professors won’t be willing to make the commitment (I am willing but still haven’t found the time).

So there we stand, interested, but definitely outside. Meanwhile, I must teach my students how to be lawyers.

Brian

Thanks for the comment. There is absolutely no doubt that there are problems with economic methods applied to legal problems without understanding the sort of doctrinal and institutional nuances you mention. I’ve written about the problem of doing economics without understanding law throughout this series of posts and agree completely with the proposition that good economics with bad law is just as unhelpful as good law with bad economics. But the problems in the corners of the restatements do exist. The point I try to make in the post is that I think one of the new challenges facing L&E is marketing those problems to economists.