Beyond Facile Assumptions and Radical Assertions: A Case for "Critical Legal Economics"

While both L&E and CLS may have emerged as a reaction to the formalism of legal process, both in turn have become trapped by their own formalisms. For traditional L&E, it is a host of facile neoclassical assumptions to make possible "a brand of economic theory that expressed more rigorously the same laissez-faire vision that the realists had attacked decades before. For CLS, a panoply of unsubstantiated radical assertions have confined its adherents to the "prescriptively impotent tools of dissent and deconstruction.' The true insights within each school emerge once the doctrinaire mask of formalism is eschewed. Once this is done, and a willingness to cross-fertilize emerges, new possibilities are created.