Before the John Bates Clark Medal (JBCM) had become a widely acknowledged professional and public marker of excellence in economics research, in the first twenty years since its inception more than seventy years ago in 1947, it was almost discontinued three times and once even not conferred. These controversies derived from the fact that the medal was originally established to showcase the expertise of economists to other scientists, policy-makers, and the wider public. While earlier awards were given to theorists, in later years empirical and policy-oriented economists gained ground, reflecting how such research became more prestigious in economics. Based on a quantitative analysis of the forty medalists so far, we show that this empirical shift was concomitant with a decrease in the diversity and an increase in concentration of laureates: twenty-four or twenty-five out of forty awardees received their PhD degree or worked at Harvard, MIT, or Chicago at the time of being awarded.

Historians of economics rarely consider textbooks as more than passive receptacles of previously validated knowledge. Therefore, their active role in shaping the discipline and its image is seldom addressed. In this paper, I study the making of Paul Samuelson’s successive editions of Economics from 1967 to 1973 as an instance of how textbooks stand at the crossroads between disciplinary knowledge, pedagogy, and larger political and societal concerns. In the mid-1960s, Economics, now at its sixth edition, was at the height of its success. Considered one cornerstone of modern economics, it was also at the center of a number of criticisms dealing with the current state of the economic discipline and its teaching in the universities. While the profession expressed its concern over the lack of relevance of economics to address the pressing issues of the day and pleaded for a new “problem-solving” approach to economic education, the late 1960s witnessed the emergence of a new generation of “radical” economists criticizing the economics orthodoxy. Their contention that mainstream theory had neglected the issues of class struggle and capitalist exploitation found a favorable echo among an increasingly politicized population. Using archival materials, I show how Samuelson, helped by his editorial team at McGraw-Hill, attempted to take into account these changes in order to ensure the continuing success of subsequent editions of his text in an increasingly competitive market. This study emphasizes Samuelson’s ambiguous attitude toward his contenders, revealing, on the one hand, his apparent openness to discussion and outsiders’ suggestions, and, on the other hand, his firm attachment to mildly liberal politics and aversion to Marxism, unchanged through revisions. It also helps refine a notion that is often invoked but never fully expounded in textbook studies: that of the audience.

Economists regularly appear as expert witnesses in antitrust litigations. This paper analyzes how their models and methodologies have performed vis-à-vis the standards of relevance and reliability affirmed by the US Supreme Court in Daubert and its progeny. Some explanations for the economists’ troubles when facing a Daubert challenge in antitrust cases are provided.

The paper explores why and how economists entered the courtrooms as expert witnesses in employment discrimination cases in the US. The main sources are published legal decisions. I analyze the courts’ and economists’ discourses on the use of a specific method: multiple regression analysis in relation to litigation history, academic debates, and the institutional settings of expertise within the courts. I first show how the early reception of the method in the late 1970s did not involve systematic rejection from the courts but rather a large amount of skepticism. I then illustrate how economic theory underlying the method was progressively introduced in the “judicial tool kit” and how the debates in the courtrooms relate to the debates in academia in the 1980s. By 1989, practical and ethical questions regarding the institutional settings of experts’ testimony took center stage, reflecting the increasing professionalization of forensic economics.

Richard Posner’s “What Do Judges and Justices Maximize?” (1993b) is not, as usually believed, the first analysis of judges’ behaviors made by using the assumption that judges are rational and maximize a utility function. That analysis arrived at the end of a rather long process. This paper recounts the history of this process, from the “birth” of law and economics in the 1960s to 1993. We show that economic analyses of judges’ behavior were introduced in the early 1970s under the pen of Posner. At that time, rationality was not modeled in terms of utility maximization. Utility maximization came later. We also show that rationality and incentives were introduced to explain the efficiency of common law. Around this theme, a controversy took place that led Posner and other economists to postpone their analysis of judicial behavior until the 1990s. By then, the situation had changed. New and conclusive evidence of judges’ utility maximizing behavior demanded a general theory to be expressed. In addition, the context was favorable to Chicago economists. It was time for Posner to publish his article.