IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/amlawe/v9y2007i1p30-47.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Sidgwick's Utilitarian Analysis of Law: A Bridge from Bentham to Becker?

Author

Listed:
  • Steven G. Medema

Abstract

Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian analysis of crime and punishment is regularly characterized as an inspiration for the economic analysis of law, whereas Henry Sidgwick has been all but ignored in the discussions of the history of law and economics. Sidgwick is well known as the godfather of Cambridge welfare economics. Yet, as we will show, his utilitarian analysis of issues in property, contract, tort, and, criminal law reflects themes now associated with the Chicago approach and advances on Bentham in multiple ways—including through the use of marginal analysis—making him a bridge on the road from Bentham to Becker. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Steven G. Medema, 2007. "Sidgwick's Utilitarian Analysis of Law: A Bridge from Bentham to Becker?," American Law and Economics Review, American Law and Economics Association, vol. 9(1), pages 30-47.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:9:y:2007:i:1:p:30-47
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/ahm008
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Edward O’Boyle & Luca Sandonà, 2014. "Teaching Business Ethics Through Popular Feature Films: An Experiential Approach," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 121(3), pages 329-340, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:9:y:2007:i:1:p:30-47. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/aler .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.