V Vijaykumar and Vivek Ranjan Pandey's Economic Analysis of Law

Overview:
Economic Analysis of Law: An Interdisciplinary Approach of Law and Economics in India, is the culmination of the hard work done by Professor V. Vijayakumar, Vice-Chancellor, National Law Institute University, Bhopal (NLIU, Bhopal), and Mr Vivek Ranjan Pandey, Advocate. The book includes scholarly pieces on diverse topics within the legal sphere, such as competition law, labor and employment law, and criminal law, amongst others, from a law and economics perspective.

The modern lawyer must keep abreast of the latest developments within this sphere, for it is imperative that he or she has a sound understanding of the economic foundations of the law, especially in a swiftly changing regulatory environment. Litigation in the commercial or regulatory field requires the modern lawyer to grasp wide-ranging concepts from microeconomics, such as efficiency, optimality, the Coase theorem, and the Pareto and Kaldorparadigms, quickly, and to employ these concepts in a coherent fashion in order to present his or her case ably.

Furthermore, law and economics are evolving and are now using insights not merely from the neo-classical branch of economics but also from the behavioral branch, where the idea of homo economicus, an entity that is able to make perfectly rational decisions using complex mathematical rules to calculate the benefits and costs arising from the choices in front of him, has been displaced by a more rational entity, possessing cognitive limitations and biases, as the basic unit of economic analysis. Therefore, it is important to engage with critical and up-to-date literature on law and economics to understand the complexity as well as gauge the economic nuances that underpin these laws.

This book will be a useful aid to lawyers, academicians, and all interested individuals, and will precipitate an outpouring of more research into this area, which, up till now, has seen its major proponents come from scholars based in the United States, such as the Nobel Prize-winning economists Friedrich August von Hayek, Herbert Simon, and Richard Thaler, amongst others.

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I congratulate the editors for this stellar achievement and I commend them for their spirited efforts towards popularising the use of law and economics as a new lens of analysis for laws in India. I extend my best wishes for the future, with the hope that this book shall nudge budding scholars and practitioners towards this field of law, and make India a center of global renown in this field.