Gindis and Medema on Henry Manne, Pareto in the Pines, and the Origins of the Law and Economics Movement

David Gindis, University of Warwick Law School and Steven G. Medema, Duke University, Department of Economics, have published Henry Manne, Pareto in the Pines, and the Origins of the Law and Economics Movement as Center for the History of Political Economy (CHOPE) Workshop Paper No. 2026-3.  Here is the abstract.

Law and economics—or the application of economic reasoning and methods to the study of law—was a niche topic of study at Chicago and Yale in 1950s and 1960s, before coming out of the wilderness in the early 1970s and becoming an institutionalized feature of American legal education by the late 1980s. Relying on archival material, the paper shows how this remarkable transformation was driven by an academic entrepreneur, Henry Manne, who in 1971 started a summer school in economics for law professors. This program prepared the ground for, and gave shape to, the intellectual and geographical spread of law and economics. But Manne's enterprise would not have succeeded had there not been a widespread demand for the inclusion of social science research in the law school curriculum, combined with the failure of the alternative law and society movement—which sought to apply sociological concepts and methodologies to the study of legal phenomena—to establish a real toehold in the law school world.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.