My Study of Law and Economics. An Educational Journey with Knowledgeable Tour Guides

After studies of economics and business administration in Cologne my academic career as an economist started 1968 as a doctoral student and later as a post doc in the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy of the University of Bochum in Germany. The economic theories, with which I worked at the time had no relation to legal or social norms. This changed, after I became a professor of economics in the newly established second law department of the University of Hamburg. It was a model trial of a reformed legal education. My lawyer colleagues propagated a more policy oriented and teleological understanding of the law, legal scholarship, and teaching and demanded the integration of social sciences into the study of the law. I began studying and teaching the classical writings of the American law and economics pioneers and related them to German private law. Gradually I shifted the focus of my academic interest and publications from development studies to the economic study of civil law and became increasingly convinced that “law and economics” corrects a scientific fallacy, which emerged when the two disciplines fell apart. Later I joined -together with my lawyer colleague Claus Ott-the European master program in law and economics, established a doctoral program in law and economics and the Hamburg institute of law and economics. After the merger of the two competing law departments the united faculty took supportive and far reaching decisions to consolidate the institute and make it a center for the study of law and economics. The following pages show in more detail the factors and reasons, which made me a convinced supporter and scholar of the economic approach to law and of institutional economics.