Can economic thinking dominate law?

Can economic thinking truly influence and perhaps even dominate legal thinking? The smooth integration of theories of economics and law is not well modeled, and even current scholars recognize these disciplines are imperfectly aligned. After a generation of predictions that economics and law would be well integrated, one might observe that a true synthesis is still a cloudy expectation. The basic distinctive attributes of the disciplines are still more easily noted than are the essential similarities. Indeed, the tracks of these two scholarly approaches can be viewed best from a perspective of published works. We suppose that the identities of economists and legal scholars are revealed in their scholarly output; we find that this output is dissimilar in approach, intent, methodology and even conclusion. The comparative evaluation of economic thinking and legal thinking is not well documented or explained except anecdotally, which would be the preferred manner for legal theorists. However, the objectives of this paper are to employ an undoubtedly biased methodology of most cited academic articles and explore the trends, bubbles, convergences and divergences in the fulsome relationship between economic and legal scholarship. Economic and legal perspectives from renowned authors writing on common issues are categorized and discussed; special topics include the effect of legal perspectives and economic views regarding firm and not-for-profit behavior, contracts, and competition.  The expected results or findings of this law and economics comparison can be presumed to parallel the classic models for a firm’s nascent stages of development; or, perhaps a bit beyond that of existence and survival, thereby demonstrating the dominance of law over economics.