Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Zumbansen, Peer; Calliess, Gralf-Peter --- "Law, Economics and Evolutionary Theory: State of the Art and Interdisciplinary Perspectives" [2011] ELECD 236; in Zumbansen, Peer; Calliess, Gralf-Peter (eds), "Law, Economics and Evolutionary Theory" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Law, Economics and Evolutionary Theory

Editor(s): Zumbansen, Peer; Calliess, Gralf-Peter

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848448230

Section Title: Law, Economics and Evolutionary Theory: State of the Art and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Author(s): Zumbansen, Peer; Calliess, Gralf-Peter

Number of pages: 30

Extract:

Law, economics and evolutionary theory: state
of the art and interdisciplinary perspectives
Peer Zumbansen and Gralf-Peter Calliess

The power of law to survive through centuries is equally apparent. As a consequence a great
deal, if not most, of law operates in a territory for which it was not originally designed, or in a
society which is radically different from that which created the law.1



1. BEFORE THE EVOLUTIONARY CHALLENGE: ECONOMICS
AND LAW DISCOVER INSTITUTIONS AND `SOCIAL
NORMS'

In 1859 Charles Darwin published his most acclaimed work, On the Origin of Species,
and after that nothing was the same in the history of human knowledge.2 Darwin's work
did not only radically change our perception of the origin and development of nature.
His ideas on the mechanisms of evolution were soon transferred to the social sciences,
though often in misconceived forms such as `social Darwinism'3 or caught up in highly
charged, polemical debates surrounding school curricula and the collision of religion
and evolution.4 As Kurt Dopfer recently noted, `[t]he publication of On the Origin of
Species by Charles Darwin in 1859 set off a paradigmatic earthquake in the sciences, and
to some degree in society at large.'5 Since then, evolutionary concepts have been success-
fully applied, refined and drawn upon to explain long-term developments and change
in human relations, societies, culture, and civilization. In jurisprudence, authors such as
Henry Sumner Maine6 and Oliver Wendell Holmes7 have relied on evolutionary ideas for
explaining the ...