Economizing Legal D-B8

Implicitly extending Stigler (1977), William Klein proposes a lexicon of twenty-eight generic arguments for normative corporate law scholarship in Criteria for Good Laws of Business Association. He suggests that adopting the lexicon would enhance the efficiency and precision of legal debate. Workable? Hardly. Since when, after all, do we select our colleagues for their communicative efficiency or precision? Yet perhaps Criteria is not about communicative efficiency at all. Perhaps it is about content-and the vacuum at the heart of most legal scholarship-instead. t Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard University. I gratefully acknowledge the comments and assistance of Mitu Gulati, Fred McChesney, Eric Rasmusen, Roberta Romano, Mark West, and the participants at the Mercatus Center conference in honor of Bill Klein; and the generous financial assistance of the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics & Business ("you used our money to write that?") at the Harvard Law School. Berkeley Business Law Journal Vol. 2.1, 2005 Economizing Legal D-B8 Economizing Legal D-B8