De Geest, Gerrit --- "Introduction" [2011] ELECD 118; in De Geest, Gerrit (ed), "Contract Law and Economics" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Contract Law and Economics

Editor(s): De Geest, Gerrit

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847206008

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Introduction

Author(s): De Geest, Gerrit

Number of pages: 6

Extract:

1 Introduction
Gerrit De Geest


This volume provides an overview of the economic literature on contract
law. There follow 20 chapters, all written by experts in the field. Each
chapter offers a thorough review of the literature, an extensive bibliogra-
phy, and a personal reflection on avenues of future research. Only seven
of the 20 chapters are updated versions of chapters that appeared in the
2000 edition of the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics; the 13 other chap-
ters are completely new. This is in line with the ambitious nature of the
second edition of the Encyclopedia: to increase the coverage from five to 12
volumes, and from 4,300 pages to nearly double that size.
Contract law is one of the classic fields of law. It is also one of the first
studied by law and economics scholars. It started, in a sense, with Coase
(1960), whose seminal article can be interpreted as a call to solve exter-
nality problems through contract law. In the late 1960s, Birmingham,
Barton, and others started to analyze specific contract law doctrines (see,
for example, Birmingham, 1969; Barton, 1972). The first monographs on
law and economics (Tullock, 1971; Posner, 1973) each devoted separate
chapters to contract law. Since then, the literature has steadily grown.
Remarkably, many of these contributions appeared in American law
reviews ­ apparently more than for most other fields.
Economic analysis of contract law got an extra boost in the 1980s, when
institutional economics gained popularity and mainstream economists
started to ...