![handle is hein.journals/eurjlwec50 and id is 1 raw text is: European Journal of Law and Economics (2020) 50:1-5
https:Ildoi.org/l 0.1007/s10657-020-09664-4
EDITORIAL
Foreword, special issue: economic analysis of litigations 2
Alain Marciano - Giovanni Ramello2 - Hans-Bernd Schaefer3
Published online: 23 July 2020
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
As weird as it seems, it took decades before justice became a relevant topic to law
and economics scholarship. Albeit judges and the judicial systems were necessar-
ily on the background of all the analyses focusing on laws, for longtime they were
treated as a sort of exogenous features, not affecting the final efficiency of the legal
system. They were by default efficient and with no role in determining the final out-
comes. Accordingly, they were considered a well-oiled machine efficiently serving
the legal system but neither relevant for becoming per se subject matter of auton-
omous investigation nor affecting the working of legal institutions. What is more,
they were essentially considered immune from mundane issues-such as self-inter-
est-characterizing the other individuals-as if judges were not human beings-and
as if the legal machinery was not affected by the problems characterizing the other
organizations. Judges were thus always supposed to provide the expected results-
actually the best possible ones.
It took thus some time-much more than in other domains, such as politics-
before was dismantled the romantic and illusory set of notions wrapping the
working of justice and before looking at it in its reality, how it works and not how
it should ideally work with its limits and its possible distortions. It can reason-
ably be said that the turning point clearly asserting that judges's behavior and that
judicial decision-making could be analyzed by using economic tools is Richard
Posner's article What Do Judges and Justices Maximize? (The Same Thing Eve-
rybody Else Does) (1993). It was the paper that finally led scholars to abandon
the romantic-to paraphrase the words Buchanan used for describing the birth
of public choice (Buchanan [1979] 1984, p. 11)-of justice. But it was not the
first one. Posner's article is the final step of a long walk in which all the elements
needed time for collapsing into an organic perspective (Marciano et al. 2020).
Indeed, signals of the incoming revolution were already present in the previous
years. It actually started in the late 1960s, with William Landes (1968, 1971).
E Giovanni Ramello
giovanni.ramello@uniupo.it
MRE and University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France
2 DiGSPES, Universith del Piemonte Orientale, Alessandria, Italy
3 Bucerius Law School, Hamburg, Germany
I_) Springer](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/eurjlwec50&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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