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Why ‘Law and Economics’ Is Not the Frankenstein Monster

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Samson Vermont
Samson Vermont
Affiliation:
The author is an attorney in Washington D.C.
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Extract

In a published debate between Law and Economics avatar Judge Richard Posner and Professor Robin Malloy entitled ‘Is Law and Economics Moral?’, Malloy argued that the dominant methodology of Law and Economics (Posner's Chicago-style wealth maximization) is immoral. Malloy likened it to the Frankenstein Monster – an unholy, undead abomination that can go berserk despite its ostensibly benign provenience. Malloy claimed that wealth maximization applied to social discourse ‘reduces people to an human existence to imaginary variables for calculation’.

Type
Symposium
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , October 1999 , pp. 249 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

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