Firmly grounded: Economics in the future of the law

Law and economics has appealed to legal scholars and practitioners and has had such an important impact on legal doctrine because, using a coherent theory of human decision-making (rational choice theory), law and economics offers an attractive method of describing how people are likely to respond to law and of making normative judgments about legal rules and institutions. In this Article, the author speculates on the future course of scholarship in law and economics. Ho identifies four areas in which work is likely to concentrate: the filling-in of gaps in our economic understanding of particular areas of private and public law; the unification of economic theory across five areas in the law; the expansion of empirical work; and the emendation of rational choice theory.