From Institutionalism to Legal Realism
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
10-1-2014
Abstract
This chapter ventures beyond most writing on Legal Realism by focusing on its link to “institutionalism,” a movement of renegade American economists who believed neoclassical economics’ stripped down conception of the “rational actor” undermined economics’ usefulness as a policy tool. Rather, economics should accommodate much more evolutionary and behavioral conceptions of human motivation. The institutionalists believed that people interacted in a wide variety of settings, or “institutions,” and that the operating rules of these institutions varied from one to another. As a result, policies that might fix failures in one institution would not work in others. They also believed that markets were feeble instruments for managing economic resources and that more state intervention was required. Although institutionalism was rejected by mainstream economists in the 1920s, the Legal Realists carried its mantle through the 1960s. The result for some time was a separation of dominant legal policy from mainstream economic doctrine.
Keywords
legal realism, institutionalism, rational actor, state intervention, economics
Publication Title
The Opening of American Law: Neoclassical Legal Thought, 1870-1970
Repository Citation
Hovenkamp, Herbert, "From Institutionalism to Legal Realism" (2014). Book Chapters. 45.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_chapters/45
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199331307.003.0007
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199331307.003.0007