Disciplinary collisions: Blum, Kalven and the economic analysis of accident law at Chicago in the 1960s

The University of Chicago occupies a central place in the history of Law and Economics. To this point, however, scant attention has been given in the literature to how the prospect of an economic analysis of law was received within the law school at Chicago when the subject was in its infancy. In this chapter we focus on the work of two prominent dissenters: Law professors Walter J. Blum and Harry Kalven, Jr. We show that, although immersed in economics and interacting with the main actors of the Law and Economics movement in the early 1950s, Blum and Kalven largely rejected economics as a possible and useful tool for solving legal problems, both because of their concerns about the utility of economics in the legal realm and because of their sense that economics and law are grounded in fundamentally incompatible normative visions.

Duke Scholars

Author Steven G. Medema Economics