In Spring 2003, the University of Illinois
College of Law created the
Illinois Program in Law and Economics (IPLE) as a means of not only reaffirming
the College of Law's longstanding strength in the economic analysis of law,
but also in setting the stage for exciting new scholarly developments in this field.
Led by Program Director and Swanlund Chair Thomas S. Ulen,
the Program has two goals: to broaden and deepen knowledge of and scholarly activity
in law and economics within the College of Law community, and to publicize the
exciting law and economics scholarship of our faculty members to scholars, judges,
attorneys, and other legal decision-makers in the United States and around the world.
Law and economics is the application of the concepts of microeconomic theory to the
analysis of legal rules, institutions, and actors. Just as microeconomic theory
seeks to predict how people will respond — as both suppliers and consumers — to explicit
prices in the marketplace, the study of law and economics uses microeconomic theory
to predict how people might respond to the implicit prices contained in legal rules and standards.
There are both positive and normative aspects of law and economics. The positive aspect
seeks to explain and measure how the law affects behavior, whether, for example, more
certain and more severe punishment for criminal offenses deters crime. The normative
aspect seeks to propose a standard — economic efficiency — for evaluating law. Very few
today believe that efficiency should be the only legal standard or that it should trump
other social concerns in evaluating law. However, law and economics could help delineate
how best to go about achieving the goals that society has otherwise decided-on whatever
grounds-that it wants to pursue.
There are some interesting trends in law and economics today. One is its spread to
previously uninvestigated areas of the law, such as comparative law and public
international law. Another is the increasing emphasis on empirical research in investigating
law's effects. Yet another is the increasing attention to the impact of findings from
cognitive and social psychology on the economic analysis of law.
At one time, only a handful of pioneering scholars, mainly in the elite
law schools of the United States, used microeconomic analysis to examine
the full range of legal topics. Since then, law and economics has become,
in much legal scholarship today, the default method of examining and evaluating
law and proposing legal reform. The creation of IPLE recognizes the importance
that the economic analysis of law has assumed in modern legal education and scholarship.
Over the past two decades, the University of Illinois College of Law has
been closely associated with the rise and maturing of the field of law and
economics. By the late 1980s, there were so many law professors and economics
professors interested in the use of economics to examine legal topics, that
a group — which included Professor Tom Ulen-met and founded the American Law
and Economics Association (ALEA).
ALEA's first meeting took place at the College of Law in May 1991, with
over 150 scholars from around the world in attendance. A highlight of that
initial meeting was a session at which the founders of the field-Ronald Coase,
Guido Calabresi, Henry Manne, and Richard Posner-spoke on the origins of and
prospects for the economic analysis of law.
Throughout the 1990s, a very talented group of young scholars was
attracted to the College of Law, helping to make Illinois one of the leading
centers of law and economics in the United States. The College continues to
build upon this strong foundation with the recent addition of new faculty
and further scholarly development of current faculty. That leading status
was recently confirmed in the 2003-2004 Educational Quality Rankings of
U.S. Law Schools. As part of a three-way tie, Illinois ranked #15 in the
nation for faculty quality in Law and Economics.
The perpetuation of the Illinois Program in Law and Economics allows
these scholars to pursue activities designed to facilitate their own
scholarship and our students' education, further enhancing the College's
reputation as a leading center of innovative legal scholarship.
