The Influence of F.A. Hayek on Law: An Empirical Analysis
This inaugural issue of the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty presumes that the work of F.A. Hayek has been important to American law. But is this true? And if true, how important is Hayek relative to other economists? This paper measures Hayek’s influence by looking at citations of famous economists in the literature of law—that is, scholarly articles in legal journals and published judicial opinions. Questions that will be asked and hopefully answered along the way include: Who are the most influential economists on law? How has the importance of specific economists or economists generally changed over time? And what do the trends in citations tell us about academic fads in legal scholarship? For example, does the winning of the Nobel Prize have an impact on the number of citations by lawyers?
Analysts have scarcely examined the legal influence of either Hayek or other economists, and the scant evidence produced to date hasn’t yielded any clear answers. On one hand, a recent empirical study of over 500 “public intellectuals,” including a few economists, by Judge Richard A. Posner ranks Hayek in the top 10% and notes that Hayek was one of the “most distinguished academic public intellectuals active in the second half of the twentieth century.” This claim is supported by the many books and web sites dedicated to the study of Hayek. For ex-ample, a search on Amazon.com yields 217 books by or about Hayek, compared with 114 for Milton Friedman and only thirteen for Ronald Coase.
