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4 Denning L.J. 1 (1989)

handle is hein.journals/denlj4 and id is 1 raw text is: Attempting the Impossible: A Plea for Legal Economy A. N. Allott* Impossible attempts This is not, I hasten to warn readers interested in criminal law, yet another examination of the law governing impossible attempts, though criminal law comes into the discussion. My theme is directed to the same set of problems which I canvassed in my Limits of Law (1980),' that is, it concerns the limits on effectiveness and utility which are necessarily implied in the enterprise of regulating human conduct by law. Regrettably, one is obliged to note that there is no progress at all to report in reducing the weight and burden of legislation in the decade since the appearance of that work. In fact, things are getting steadily worse, as I shall seek to show. Although this topic sounds theoretical and more in the realm of jurisprudence than of practical affairs, this impression would be totally wrong. The implications of this enquiry are deeply practical. What governments and those who push or pressure them are trying to do, viz. to multiply laws in the vain attempt to control - whether by prescription or proscription - ever-increasing areas of our life in society, is doomed to partial or total failure. The failure becomes the likelier the heavier the weight of the new laws and their administration that is imposed on the society and its agents. We are, in my view, now reaching saturation point and beyond. Legal economy So much for attempting the impossible. Now for legal economy. I confess without shame that this is a pun. Often the truth lies in paronomasia. What is argued here is not just a study of the relations of law and economics, interesting and important though these are. But, just as we have the separate subjects of study represented by the terms 'politics' and 'economics' and yet find a need for a discipline linking them, which we call 'political economy', so in my view we should recognise, define, and operate within a new area of study, to be called 'legal economy'. This would provide more than a cost-benefit analysis (though that would form part of the concerns of the legal economist) of new and existing law; in *Professor of African and Comparative Law, University of Buckingham. 1. Butterworths, London 1980, passim.

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