Against Market Rationality: Moral Critiques of Economic Analysis in Legal Theory

Abstract

Sometimes, apparently unrelated bodies of thought turn out to contain and express common themes. To our surprise, we found a set of common themes and concerns running through three bodies of theory that might otherwise appear unconnected: environmental ethics, civic republicanism, and commodification. In very different contexts, authors in all three areas seemed to ask some very similar questions. Collected together, these questions comprise a novel critique of the economic analysis of law-a "moral" critique that is quite different from technical and distributional critiques that have been offered in the past.