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31 Eur. J.L. & Econ. 1 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/eurjlwec31 and id is 1 raw text is: Eur J Law Econ (2011) 31:1-9 DOI 10.1007/s10657-010-9200-0 Ronald Coase, The Problem of Social Cost and The Coase Theorem: An anniversary celebration Alain Marciano Published online: 24 November 2010 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 The articles gathered in this special issue were written in homage to Ronald Coase (who was born 100 years ago) and to The Problem of Social Cost (that was published 50 years ago), an article evidently of the utmost importance for law and economics in particular and, more broadly, also for economics. The legacy of Coase is therefore important and indeed multiple. This introduction, and this issue, would be too short to remind in what it consists while thousands of pages were written on the subject-among which can be singled out Medema's Ronald H. Coase (An Intellectual Biography) (1994) and The Legacy of Coase (1995). The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Problem of Social Cost nonetheless offers us the opportunity to remind or revisit important elements about Coase's 1960 path-breaking article. In the first place, it may not be useless to stress that, as the standard history of law and economics goes, The Problem of Social Cost represents nothing less than the beginning of modern (Hovenkamp 1990, p. 494) or new (Posner 1975) law and economics-by which it is of course not meant that law and economics did not exist before Coase and did not evolve after Coase: not only, there were economists who paid attention to the legal dimension of economic phenomena before Coase but the latter established a new paradigm (Manne 1993), bringing rigour and formalism to approaches-essentially those developed by the old institutionalists-too descrip- tive and lacking of a solid theoretical background. But also, The Problem of Social Cost marks the entering in a new era does not mean that law and economics did not continue to evolve after Coase. From this perspective, it would be unfair to ignore that other contributors have also played a crucial role-for the instance the other founding fathers identified by the American Law and Economics Association in 1991, Guido Calabresi, Henry Manne and Richard Posner. Similarly, one should not A. Marciano (E) Universit6 de Montpellier 1, Facult6 d'Economie and LAMETA-CNRS, Avenue Raymond Dugrand, CS 79606, 34960 Montpellier cedex 2, France e-mail: alain.marciano@univ-montpl.fr I Springer

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