Regulation, Property Rights, and Definition of “The Market”: Law and the American Economy
指出19世纪美国产权、法律与经济发展跨学科研究中的四个问题，包括过度强调法律的正面功能、夸大司法风格转变、以东部州和威斯康星州概括全国、未能准确识别规制与产权斗争中的赢家和输家。
This article identifies four problems in the recent interdisciplinary studies of property rights, law, and economic development in the nineteenth-century United States. First, recent studies stress too exclusively the positive functions of law in either the “release of entrepreneurial energy” or the exploitative allocation of advantages (by courts and legislatures) to the business interests leading industrialization. Second, the dichotomy between alleged “instrumentalism” as the prevailing judicial style before 1860 and “formalism” after 1865 has been exaggerated. Third, generalizations have been based too much on the eastern states and Wisconsin. Fourth, there has been a failure to identify accurately the winners and losers in the struggle over regulation and the definition of property rights. Thus, although rediscovery of the importance of institutions by economists and the renaissance of legal history among historians and legal scholars constitute welcome (converging) developments in recent scholarship, much more research is needed on these main themes in the literature.