Prof. em. Ejan Mackaay, LL.M., LL.D. (Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal und Fellow der interdisziplinären DFG-Forschergruppe Cultural Property, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) wird am Mittwoch, 21. Oktober um 18 Uhr c.t. einen öffentlichen Vortrag zum Thema
“The Culture of Law & Economics and the Law & Economics of Culture”
im ZHG 005 halten. Veranstalter sind der Lehrstuhl Prof. Dr. Spindler und die Interdisziplinäre DFG-Forschergruppe zu Cultural Property. Aus der Veranstaltungsankündigung:
When I went through law school, law appeared as a collection of rules, procedures and institutions, perhaps with some coherence, as behoves a country with a Civil Code, but mostly to be memorised without too much inquiry into that coherence. Law was foremost black letter law. Where it did not appear altogether fixed, one would reason one’s way to new results by reliance on one’s sense of justice or fairness. To persons outside the legal community law must have looked like a forbidding black box.
This conception was common to most developed legal systems. But from the 1970s onwards, a new approach was put forth, initially in the USA and from there in other countries as well, proposing to look at the law through the effects legal rules produce amongst persons subject to it. These effects were to be determined by drawing on tools provided by economics, looking at humans as by-and-large rational actors and at law as providing signals affecting the costs and benefits these actors face and to which they adjust their behaviour. This approach strikingly showed a common rationale to wide ranges of legal rules. It made law understandable in an accessible manner.
The approach is known as the economic analysis of law or for short law & economics. It has triggered what may truly be called a conceptual revolution in legal thinking: law is to be understood not merely as black letter complemented with one’s sense of justice, but also through the consequences it produces.
In the first part, the culture of law & economics, I will illustrate the approach by looking at the example of Code provisions dealing with the sale of stolen goods (“goods laundering”) in civil law.
If law & economics is a powerful engine helping us to make sense of existing and yet to be fashioned legal rules, can it give us handles on how “cultural goods” should be dealt with, some claiming them to be property, others demanding intellectual property rights, and yet others payments for the holders of such goods? The second part of the lecture, the law & economics of culture, will tackle that question.