Law and Economics 2.0: un don de 10M$ pour relancer le mouvement

Le magazine Fortune annonçait (ici) il y a quelques jours sur le blog Legal Pad un don de 10M$ effectué par la Fondation Kauffman pour redynamiser l'analyse économique du droit. Le don visera le développement de l'entrepreunariat: "Kauffman’s new “Law, Innovation and Growth” initiative seeks to refocus the law-and-economics debate to center on the promotion of entrepreneurship, which has long been one of the key goals of that Foundation".

Il est intéressant de souligner que le vice-président de la fondation qui sera responsable de ce don a une vision riche et nuancée de l'analyse économique du droit:

Though the field of law and economics has often been seen as a politically conservative movement, the leader of the Kauffman initiative will be Robert Litan, Kauffman’s vice president of research and policy. Litan has held prominent governmental positions during Democratic administrations and has been affiliated with the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution for nearly 20 years. Among other things, Litan was deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division of the Clinton Justice Department when Justice first went after Microsoft in the 1990s. (Litan has both a Ph.D. in economics and a law degree from Yale.)

“I’d characterize the law-and-economics school as a mode of economic thinking,” says Litan in an interview, contending that it is politically neutral. “There are many people in the field who are Democrats as well as Republicans, liberals rather than conservatives.”

Indeed, the field’s two most towering figures, he stresses, are positioned toward opposite ends of the political spectrum: Richard Posner, the conservative, former University of Chicago Law School professor and now Reagan-appointed, federal appeals court judge in Chicago; and Guido Calabresi, the liberal former Yale Law School professor and dean, and Clinton-appointed federal appeals court judge in New York.

La fondation souhaite que des travaux s'intéressent à l'efficience dynamique pour accroître la prospérité.

In Litan’s view, the law-and-economics movement to date has focused on the issue of achieving “static efficiency” — in essence, how best to allocate the existing pie of wealth — while giving insufficient attention to dynamic efficiency, i.e., the need to ensure that the pie keeps growing.

Elle semble également vouloir tempérer les ardeurs formelles qui ont caractérisé les travaux au cours des dernières années.

Even before the current economic crisis, Litan says, the law-and-economics movement needed a shot of adrenaline for at least two reasons. The first was age: the school, after all, got rolling in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago. “Like all revolutions when they mature,” observes Litan, “they change. They hit sort of a wall. What’s happened to law and economics is . . . that it’s become incredibly mathematical, very niche, highly theoretical, and difficult to understand.”

Il sera certainement de voir les effets structurant de ce don au cours des prochaines années.