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The interrelations between legal and economic processes: a consideration of the reactions

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Abstract

The responses to my 1972 article on the interrelations between legal and economic processes are summarized and critiqued. The principal authors are James Buchanan, Peter Boettke, and William Fischell. My replies center on the normative character of their proposed alternative interpretations vis-à-vis my strictly positive approach. My positivist approach considers law as made rather than found; that law is not something transcendental and given but a matter of human social choice through pragmatic processes; that belief system and material interest influence law making and the law that is made influences belief system and material interests. The article thus is a defense of undertaking an objective, positivist analysis of law and government as they exist in actual political economies (legal-economic nexuses).

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Notes

  1. These roles are performed, incrementally in a composite process, by all the departments of government, not solely the courts, i.e., government as a whole.

  2. The foregoing language and model are adapted and/or derive from Auerbach 1959 and Samuels 1972a, 1989a.

  3. The foregoing paragraphs are paraphrasing of Samuels (1972a).

  4. I have further developed the positive nature of my analysis in Samuels (1989a, 2002b, 2004a, b, 2005a, b, 2007), Medema and Saumels (2000), Samuels and Mercuro (1980, 1979, 1999).

  5. With his acquiescence, I have used Fischel’s draft of April 23, 2004 in preparing this section. The draft of July 14, 2006 is somewhat shorter but has no material change in his argument.

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    Warren J. Samuels

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Correspondence to Warren J. Samuels.

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The author is indebted to Peter Boettke, Richard Dawson, William Fischel, Peter Lipsey, Nicholas Mercuro and Allan Schmid for help in preparing this paper.

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Samuels, W.J. The interrelations between legal and economic processes: a consideration of the reactions. Constit Polit Econ 18, 243–285 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-007-9023-3

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