George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan castigates the lawyers:
At [the] risk of offending my many friends in the legal academy, I think that law is a shockingly phony discipline. Virtually everyone - liberal, conservative, Marxist, libertarian, or whatever - imagines that the law conveniently agrees with what they favor on non-legal grounds. Almost no one admits that many, if not most, laws are so vague that there is no "fact of the matter" about what they mean.
Once in a while, I should add, a law professor has told me this verbatim, and then gone back to arguing about the law. The philosopher in me insists, "If there's no such thing as unicorns, we can't argue about unicorns," but the Great Unicorn Debate never stops.
I think Bryan is wrong. (For example, the minimum age for President is 35, whereas I believe it should be 33; thus, the law and I are in inconvenient disagreement.) But at least we can agree that the kind of ideological biasing he adverts to is completely alien to economics.
(Via Ilya Somin.)
