My research interests lie at the intersection of economics, law, history and philosophy, and more specifically in the historical development of social institutions and the problem of how social order is created and maintained. I believe that social life cannot be understood from a single perspective, and have written in a range of scholarly disciplines and fields, including economic theory, law and economics, economic, political and legal history, the history of economic thought, and economic philosophy.
Books
The Rise of Planning in Industrial America, 1865-1914 (2012)
How American firms grew very large after the Civil War, and how Americans responded to...
Articles
States Without Romance, Public Choice (2012)
A short appreciation of Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent (1962).
Firms as Social Actors, Journal of Institutional Economics (2010)
A close look at what firms are and how they act.
Organizations and Economics, Journal of Institutional Economics (2010)
A contribution to a symposium on a paper by Richard Posner.
An Economic Model of Fair Use (with Thomas Miceli), Information Economics and Policy (2006)
A formal model of the law of fair use.
Knowledge and Power in the Mechanical Firm: Planning for Profit in Austrian Perspective, Review of Austrian Economics (2005)
A theory of central planning employing Austrian themes and applied to private firms and Taylorism.
Contributions to Books
Progressive Era, The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (2008)
A short interpretive summary of the period 1890 - 1914.
Economics of Plea Bargaining, The Encyclopedia of Law and Society: American and Global Perspectives (2007)
A short summary of earlier work for a sociological audience.
The Origins of Property and the Powers of Government, The Fundamental Interrelationships Between Government and Property (1999)
The alternating influence of Locke and Bentham in American constitutional law.
Four Entries, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Law and Economics (1998)
Four entries: "American Institutional Economics and the Legal System" (I: 61-66); "John Rogers Commons" (I:...
Charles E. Lindblom, New Horizons in Economic Thought: Appraisals of Leading Economists (1992)
An intellectual biography and review of the work of Charles E. Lindblom.
Presentations
What Economists Really Know, and What They Don't, One Day University (2010)
A PowerPoint presentation on what it's possible for economists to know.
Other
The Negotiated Guilty Plea: A Framework for Analysis (1975)
My dissertation of 1975, published by Garland Publishing in their series Outstanding Dissertations in Economics,...