This article studies the few works James Buchanan wrote on education from the end of the 1950s to the early 1970s. These neglected works tell us important things about how Buchanan’s ideas on constitutions evolved through time, because they provided Buchanan with the opportunity to apply his ideas about constitutions Read more…
The purpose of this chapter is to link Ronald Coase’s methodological approach to what he ‘learned’ when he was at the London School of Economics (LSE) from Edwin Cannan and Arnold Plant. The main lesson Coase taught us and insisted upon was that economics should not be too ‘abstract’ and Read more…
This essay reviews Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, which triggered a huge controversy that virally spread on the internet and in various journals. We will evaluate MacLean’s almost biographical account of James Buchanan, which portrays the 1986 Nobel Prize Read more…
Law and Economics deals with the economic analysis of legal relations, legal provisions, laws and regulations and is a research field which has a long tradition in economics. It was lost after the expulsion of some of the leading economists from Germany during 1933 to 1938, but then revived in Read more…
The ethics of autonomous cars and automated driving have been a subject of discussion in research for a number of years (cf. Lin 2015; Goodall in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 2424:58–65, 2014; Goodall in IEEE Spectrum 53(6):28–58, 2016). As levels of automation progress, with partially Read more…
Although both the problem of corruption and its detrimental effects on society, economy, and environment has widely been recognized, corruption remains one of the most challenging problems of today. In light of globalization, the exclusive focus on compliance-oriented measures such as sharpening laws seems to be more and more ineffective. Read more…
The theme arises from the legal-academic movement “Law and Literature”. This newly developed field should aim at two major goals, first, to investigate the meaning of law in a social context by questioning how the characters appearing in literary works understand and behave themselves to the law (law in literature), Read more…
This paper compares and contrasts two schools of political economy: the Austrian School, prominent members of which include Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; and the Bloomington School, which was founded by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It is argued that the two traditions share a good deal in common: both Read more…