Law and Economics: Introduction
This is the second in a series of symposium issues exploring important topics in institutional analysis and policy. The December 1972 issue investigated macroeconomic institutional innovation, and the December 1974 issue will be concerned with market, institutions, and technology and will be dedicated to Clarence Ayres. The study of the interrelations between legal and economic processes has been and continues to provide a strategic focus upon the developing economic system. It has been pursued in both the Veblen-Liebhafsky and Ely-Commons-Witte traditions and by John Maurice Clark, Walton Hamilton, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kenneth Boulding, Robert Solo, and many others within and without institutionalism.' The law and economics area is one in which extremely deep policy decisions are made and ensconced, fundamental decisions about the socioeconomic order that are no less critical because they have accumulated gradually and often nondeliberatively. It is a pointed indication of the importance of the interrelations between legal and economic processes that all of the world's secular ideologies are directed at influencing those interrelations, each selectively reenforcing and inhibiting certain uses of both the state and the economy. Most persons' views of the legal-economic world, including most professional economists, depend upon or reflect the fundamentals of one or another ideology, each dealing on its deepest levels with the interrelations between legal and economic processes. Needless to say, each of these ideologies selectively ignores and obscures, as well as reveals and interprets, important aspects of the phenomena involved, this being, of course, a primary function of ideology in general. The law and economics area is a policy field, and it is therefore important to recognize the necessary input and role of normative ideologies for the complex decisional processes involved. But it is precisely because ideology