Towards Contributions of Legal Scholarship and Economics to the Theory of Institutions

Abstract

Elsewhere, the author dealt with know-how transfers to and from legal scholarship and economics. In the present article, he seeks to confront the two disciplines with a theory of institutions. Given that the key word institution is by and large associated with that of a social rule, his objective is to disclose it within the usual parlance of the Lawyer and the Economist. Expectedly, the Lawyer’s concept of a legal norm is directly interpreted as nothing more or less than a specific type of social rule. By far less obvious is then the author’s search for social rules inside the toolkit of economics. The author concludes that the Lawyer should propose to the Institutionalist to assign to every social rule (formal or informal) its Designer and Executor. Similarly, the Economist can suggest seeing the Designer as a decision-maker who, in the sense of textbook economics, selects an optimal social rule sr^* from a set of variant social rules sr_1, sr_2, sr_{3, …,} sr_N. Hence, the author also suggests how the natural language of social scholarship could be replaced with more formal vehicles of communication.