Bom verbete!

Law and Economics, by David D. Friedman: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: Library of Economics and Liberty

Trecho:
The economic analysis of law deals with legal rules, whether made by legislatures or by courts, from this second viewpoint—not as a way of handing out rewards and punishments to those who deserve them, but as a system of incentives intended to affect behavior. Economic theory is used to predict how rational individuals will respond to such rules and what the consequences will be. This way of thinking about the law, and the conclusions it implies, are obvious in cases such as the speeding law. In other cases the analysis and the conclusions are much less obvious.