I just uploaded on SSRN the paper 'Economic Analysis of Law, or Economically-Informed Legal Research', which will be published in Dawn Watkins and Mandy Burton (eds), Research Methods in Law, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2017). Almost unbelievably, it is my 70th SSRN paper! Its abstract is as follows:
In this chapter, I aim to reflect on the topic of ‘lay decision-making in the legal system’ from the perspective of the economic analysis of law. Or, in other words, I attempt to look at the ways in which economic theory and insight can help resolve issues of legal decision-making by providing both a methodology for the analysis of the legal reality to which the decision relates (that is, contributing to the decision-making process by structuring it and helping us focus on relevant factors), and a normative framework and workable criteria to favour some alternatives over others (i.e. providing a decision-making benchmark). Broadly, then, I am concerned with the question of how can economic analysis help us improve legal decision-making generally. After this broad discussion, which is confessedly superficial, and in order to stress the link with the rest of the contributions to this book, I briefly focus on the potential application of some of these theories to research that aims to assess specific issues of lay decision-making in the legal system. Some final thoughts stress the importance of carrying out economically-informed legal research more generally.
The full reference for the paper is: A Sanchez-Graells, 'Economic Analysis of Law, or Economically-Informed Legal Research', in Dawn Watkins and Mandy Burton (eds), Research Methods in Law, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2017, forthcoming), available on SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2798193.