Abstract

This paper takes note of the success of the economic analysis of law (Eal) and contrasts it with the theoretical deficiencies and the practical limits of this theory. The reasons for the success of the Eal despite its serious flaws are identified in its ability to give legal form to the neoliberal policies and to frame them into the legal system. The Eal's success is therefore parasitic of the successes recorded by the neoliberal policies in recent decades. In order to demonstrate this thesis the paper discusses the theoretical characteristics of neoliberalism, the main one being, in the Author opinion, the idea that market failures can be corrected by intervening on every single transaction, rather than on the large aggregates of the market. This change of perspective and the idea (which has been proven wrong by the financial crisis) that a sum of rational transactions necessarily leads to a maximization of the efficiency of the whole system, underpin the conceptual apparatus of the Eal. The flaws and limitations of this theoretical apparatus - illustrated in the second part of the paper - combine to explain both the reasons for, and the many failures of, the legislative choices made in the decades dominated by neoliberal policies.