For a complete list of course offerings in Law and Economics, including full descriptions and faculty who will be teaching the offerings in 2008-2009, refer to the online Curriculum Guide.
Economics is a valuable tool for understanding the consequences of legal doctrine and how legal processes work. Economics provides positive and normative accounts of how persons, individually and in the aggregate, behave when the scarcity of available resources or legal constraints force them to make choices. Its increased use in both the classroom and legal scholarship represents perhaps the most notable single change of the last 30 years in American law schools. Economic analysis has spread from its traditional domain of antitrust and regulated industries to fields as varied as the common law of contracts, tort and property, corporate and securities law, commerecial law, tax, domestic relations, criminal law, administrative law, procedure, international law and constitutional law. Accompanying this trend, economic analysis plays an important role in many courses across the whole curriculum. In addition, Columbia offers a number of courses that specifically focus on economics as a method for studying law.
