Law and Methods Seminar

Guest Speaker: Chantal Thomas, Vice Dean and Radice Family Professor of Law, Cornell Law School

Economic approaches to law - economistic analyses of law's "efficiency" or "utility" - became highly prevalent in the 20th century both in Anglo-American law, and elsewhere, and continue to dominate a wide range of legal sub-disciplines. Generations of critics have faulted these models for obscuring the role of power and political choice in legal rulemaking, and for legitimating modes of governance that center market fundamentalism. What tools and techniques – including approaches from literatures on legal realism, on law and political economy, and on racial capitalism - can be applied to questions of economic regulation to surface social context, and to clarify political stakes and legal possibilities?